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The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

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I found this book on my bookshelf and I’m not sure where it came from. There was a time when I collected leather bound books at estate sales and it may have come from there. Whenever I start a book I always check the copyright page to see the date of publication. This book has no copyright page at all, which is very unusual. So I don’t know when it was published. the story takes place I would say early twentieth century. Lily Bart is a beautiful young woman in New York society who has had several opportunities to marry well but has never done so. Her parents are deceased and she lives with her aunt who provides her with expensive clothing but no money of her own. With only a small stipend to pay her expenses, she lives a life of high society staying with wealthy friends most of the year in country houses, invited for her beauty and charm. When we enter the story she has set her cap for a wealthy but dull young man, Percy, who is astonished that a girl so beautiful and sophisticated would even notice him. It doesn’t take much for Lily to ensnare him, her plan is that once married she will coax him into the expensive lifesyle she dreams of with elegant houses and entertainment for the rest of her days. But just at the moment she should be finalizing the deal by going to church with him and a group of house guests, she instead pleads ill and then goes off for a walk with a man whom she truly likes, maybe even loves, but who has little in the way of money, Lawrence Seldon. Because she didn’t go, Percy meets a wealthy heiress who is quite plain, and soon they are engaged to be married.

The list of eligible men is dwindling rapidly. Lily spends time with a married couple and rides out one day with the husband, who takes pity on Lily’s plight and offers to invest her small amount of savings so that she receives some return on the investment. Soon Lily has received several thousand dollars from this scheme. This allows her to pay off her debts and spend freely for a while, which she enjoys immensely. She even pays a charwoman who has collected some letters from a married woman to Lawrence Seldon, to keep quiet. Lily keeps the letters secret. She also gives a small amount to Gerty Farish, Seldon’s relation, who is in straightened financial circumstances but has learned to live a more frugal life and spends her time working with poor women in the community. But what Lily regards as a pure investment situation becomes something far more serious. The husband who made the investment invites Lily to his home one evening, pretending that his wife is the one who has asked her to call. His wife is not even in London and the husband is demanding his payment, not in cash, for services rendered. Although Lily manages to extricate herself from the situation, she does not go unseen, leaving the house late at night when everyone knows she is alone with the man. She vows to pay the money back but has no way to do so. Just as she is about to be forced to do something drastic, another married couple asks her to take a cruise to the Mediterranean and she is gone the next morning. But this proves to be a very bad choice as the wife has asked Lily to entertain her husband while she pursues another love interest. Lily is again compromised and with the help of Lawrence, who was also traveling in the area on business, goes home to her aunt.

When she arrives home, her aunt has passed away. But unbeknowst to Lily her aunt has changed her will and the bulk of the estate, which was to have come to her upon her aunt’s death, now goes to another relative and Lily is to receive ten thousand dollars, which is just enough to settle her debt from the so-called investment. To make matters even worse, she will not receive the money for almost a year due to the slow legal processes of the time. A few friends try to help her, setting her up as a private secretary to aspiring new-money society ladies, trying to get invitations to the cultured society events that Lily is part of. A wealthy business man is also pursuing her, he has enough money to give her whatever her heart desires and is in love with her but Lily detests him and can’t bring herself to consider a relationship with him, even though it would mean the end of her financial woes for good. But as her place in society sinks lower and lower, he no longer is willing to marry her. He knows about the letters she has in her possession and advises her to in a way, blackmail the woman who wrote them. This is the wife of the man who invested her money and is snubbing Lily in a very public manner. Lily realizes it’s not because there was anything romantic about their relationship, it’s because the man gave her money. The wealthy suitor advises that she merely let the woman know she has the letters and come to an understanding that she will be welcomed in high society again and Lily will keep the letters secret. This will fulfil her wealthy suitor’s ambitions, he has enough money to set Lily up as the hostess with the mostest, so to speak but wants the high society to go with it. Lily, who has by now resorted to taking laudanum in order to sleep, and is suffering from exhaustion, decides she must do as her suitor suggests and takes the letters with the intention of securing her place in society by paying a visit to her former friend. On the way she gets caught in a downpour and finds herself at Lawrence Seldon’s apartment. He takes her in, seeing that she is in crisis, and gives her tea to try to help settle her. While there Lily realizes she can’t subject this man, who she probably loves if she could ever admit in, to the insult of making use of his letters to blackmail her former friend. Lily asks him to build up the fire and while he’s not looking, burns the packet in his fireplace.

Lily makes her way home and finds to her surprise that the check for ten thousand dollars has arrived, the lawyers have concluded their work early. She writes a check to the investor for nine thousand dollars, the amount she received from the investment and leaves the checks on her desk. Unable to sleep again, she takes the laudanum which she has become reliant on for chasing away the nightly fears. next morning Seldon makes his way to her boarding house only to find Gerty there, Lily has overdosed and died.

Such a sad story and yet if at any time Lily had come to grips with her situation and learned to control herself she could’ve had a happy life. But her beauty made her the plaything of society. Her only safe harbor was marriage to either wealthy men whom she abhorred, or to a good man who had nothing and where her only talents, which are for society life, would be useless.

Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George

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Inspector Lynley is called upon by his boss’s boss to investigate an accidental drowning at a wealthy businessman’s estate. It’s all on the hush-hush and he can’t tell his immediate supervisor where he’s going or what he’s doing. This would in itself be a problem but it becomes much more complex because he and his boss are having an affair. Given the awkward situation he asks his friends the St. James to travel to the country and help him. One is a forensic pathologist and the other is a photographer. The businessman’s son is a prime suspect for the death of his cousin, Ian who ran the family business of selling toilets. The son, Nick, is a ne’er do well addict and troublemaker who has married a beautiful wife from South America and returned home to turn over a new leaf and rebuild his life while helping older homeless men out of their addictions and vagrancy. While Lynley and St. James investigate the boathouse where the accident occurred, St. James’ wife Deborah goes to meet the son and his wife at home. While having tea she notices a magazine on conception, childbirth on the table and flipping through it, sees several pages torn from the back. Deborah herself is interested in this magazine because she and St. James have been unable to have a child of their own, she will never be able to carry a baby to term. So she tries every way she can to make friends with this beautiful South American woman who she feels she can establish a bond with over their shared problems with starting a family.

Lynley also enlists Barbara Havers, his work partner to do some digging back in London. She finds every one of the family, all their history, some good, some bad, but can’t find anything on Nick’s wife, no photos, no history except a family name that comes up as the mayor of a small town in Argentina. When she contacts them, it appears they recognize her name but because of the language barrier (Barbara does not speak Spanish except maybe to order a beer) she can’t make out what they’re saying.

The plot has a lot of twists and turns. The man who died had left his wife for his male lover some time ago and now his teenage son and young daughter are left living with the latter after the death of their father. Their mother apparently wants nothing to do with the children. Tim, the teenage boy, is in bad shape, enrolled in a school for troubled youth but bound and determined to take out his rage on something, and soon. He is self-destructive and when his aunt tries to help he ends up attacking her. The aunt, Manette, is in the middle of a family crisis herself, having divorced her husband, Freddie who still lives in the same house, but who has decided to start dating again. He finds that today’s dates often want to find out if they’re sexually compatible right away, because what’s the point if not, right? So she would readily take the children but she can’t given that her husband is regularly sleeping out all night or having potential mates show up at the house. This family is a mess. Freddie starts looking at the business accounts that Ian was managing up until his death, and finds all sorts of money being paid out to children, former employees, and Nick’s projects. It has to come to an end and he calls on his in-laws with Manette and they begin discussing these payments. The matriarch of the family is still head of the board of directors, her husband started out at the firm and worked his way to the top as well as into the family which he now heads. Lynley by now has been identified as the inspector he really is, and a lot of truths come crawling out of the woodwork. The husband has been having affairs for years and one of the daughters, Mignon, has been blackmailing him, threatening to tell her mother not only about the woman but also about the child she has with him. and as it turns out, as far as Lynley and St. James can tell, there was nothing suspicious about the cousin’s death. It was an accident due to loose stones on the dock in the boathouse. The mother requested her husband to call in Scotland Yard to investigate because she wanted to find out about her husband. She saw it as an opportunity to find out the truth under guise of foul play in Ian’s death. But what no one realized was that another secret was hidden at Nick’s home, his wife had been born a male and had fled to Mexico, where he became the lover of a wealthy man who paid for surgery to become a female. She then fled to the United States to begin her life as a woman in body and spirit, where she met Nick during his wild days in the western US. They fell in love and she never told him the truth, just that she used to pose for underwear magazines and was involved with the Mexican tycoon and so didn’t want any photos of her to be published, afraid that he would look her up and ruin her life with Nick. Deborah St. James’ efforts to find out about this woman caused her to panic. She knew Deborah wasn’t being truthful, and had hooked up with a young reporter from a tabloid magazine. She thought the two of them were out to expose her and went out on the flats to try to run away, but was caught in quick sand and the incoming tide, lost in a fog that had swept in ahead of the tidal bore. Deborah confronted the woman just before she panicked and would always know that she had caused her death. Especially when her husband and Lynley both had asked, begged, and demanded, as much as they could, to let it drop. She finally realized that it was her own longing for a child that had made her want to be friends with this woman. She could never have a child herself, but had found a woman who would carry a baby for her, they planned to go abroad for a time before the birth and she would return with the infant her husband so wanted. A foolish plan these days, since DNA testing would show that neither father or mother carried the same genes. What a mess. It was a good story, very intriguing and I stayed up way too late one Saturday night reading the end of it.

I do enjoy Elizabeth George’s work, the plots are always interesting, the only thing I don’t like is the use of so much explicit sex in her stories. I guess I’m old fashioned enough to wish the implication not be so very well spelled out, but that’s the norm these days. I guess books don’t sell unless they’ve got plenty of sexy details on display. Still a good read though.

Paw and Order, by Spencer Quinn

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Published 2014

A Chet and Bernie Mystery

Bernie Little and his canine, Chet travel to Washington, D.C. to see Bernie’s girl, Suzie Sanchez. But when they arrive, Bernie driving the Porsche and Chet riding shotgun, as he calls it, they see Suzie with another man, who is leaving her carriage house apartment. Bernie doesn’t know what to think. A little while later, this same man is found dead in his office. Politics are involved, as you would expect in D.C., and Suzie being a journalist for the Washington Post, is eager for the scoop that will propel her to the top of the news scene. If she can get the news early on a potential presidential candidate announcing his bid for the White House it could be her ticket out of the lifestyle section and into the headlines. This eagerness could endanger her life, if she didn’t have Bernie and Chet there to get to the bottom of who murdered her friend.

These are lighthearted books and the best part is, they are narrated by a dog! Chet fills us in on how much better his nose is than ours and how confusing it is, for instance when a biker calls Bernie ‘yellow’. Chet is not good with colors but he’s sure that Bernie, the best human in the world, bar none, is not that color. Chet has been K9 trained but never did make it into the police academy, which has turned out to be a good thing because now he’s partners with Bernie in the Little Detective Agency. Chet’s inner dog world turns out to be a very interesting one but mostly, it’s happy. Chet can’t remember lots of things and it seems that’s fine with him since lots of things are not so great to remember anyway. And even when things are looking their worst the simplest thing will have Chet back on cloud nine.

I love the idea of these books, Chet is one of my favorites.

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

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2018

Willa Knox has inherited her aunt’s house in Vineyard, New Jersey just when her husband has found a teaching job nearby, so she thinks her luck has changed for the better. She’d built a career in the magazine industry as a journalist but the magazines, like all print media, are going under. With her career ended she moves with her husband, his disabled father, and her daughter into the old house and begins repairs. But the contractor who shows up to give her an estimate has bad news, the house’s foundation can’t be fixed. With this bad news comes more, her son Zeke’s wife has taken her own life shortly after giving birth to a baby boy. Willa brings the baby back to her crumbling house and finds herself caring for a grumpy, elderly father-in-law and a new baby who has lost his mother. Quite a career change.

Over a hundred years ago, another family lived on the same corner, maybe even the same house. Thatcher Greenwood has taken a position as a teacher at the local school in the town of Vineyard. The house is falling down around him and his wife Rose, her younger sister Polly, and the girls’ mother. Thatcher is excited about teaching his science classes about the new theories of Charles Darwin. As it happens his neighbor, Mary Treat is in correspondence with Darwin regarding rare species of plants and animals she finds in the countryside nearby. Mary’s husband has deserted her and Thatcher finds in her a reasoning mind similar to his own, a vivid contrast between her and the females of his household. At this time, the city is ruled by a man named Landis, who built the town promising heaven on earth. He has control of most aspects of the city including the school where Thatcher teaches. The schoolmaster demands that Thatcher debate him in front of the community with Landis officiating. Thatcher does very well, having been coached by young Polly and Mary Treat, but there’s really no winning against a man like Landis, whose authority could be threatened by reasoning minds.

Meanwhile, in the current century Willa is trying to find out if Mary Treat lived in her house, hoping that if she did, she can get funding from a historical society to restore it. Mary has gone on to become a noted naturalist after Thatcher Greenwood leaves the area. Willa’s daughter begins to show a very mature interest in her nephew, and the boy’s father has moved to the big city to try to move on past the death of his beloved wife.

Unsheltered reminds us of the value of what we call home, how sometimes the roof over our heads is not where home is, that it may have more to do with the people we are with than any man made structure.

God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison

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Published 2015

Lula Ann’s mother is light-skinned, and so is her father. When she is born midnight black her mother can’t understand how it happened. Sweetness can’t convince her husband that she did not fool around with a black, very black man. He leaves after a few years. While Sweetness considers giving up the baby for adoption, or abandoning her, she can’t bring herself to do it. But she also can’t bring herself to love her child, the color of her skin turns her away. Lula Ann grows up without affection, her mother won’t touch her or even hold her hand in public, she is so ashamed of her black skin. Grown up now, changing her name to Bride, the young woman embraces her blackness and has succeeded in heading up a cosmetics firm. While financially successful, Bride has no close friends or a significant other until she meets Booker one night out dancing. For a while they are perfect until the day he tells her she is not the one for him and leaves without explanation. Thus begins Brides’ descent into despair.

Both Bride and Booker experienced childhood tragedies that they carry with them into their adult lives. Events they have never fully gotten over, which they keep trying to correct long after it is possible to do so. In some ways these events provide the impetus to push them forward along their career paths to success, especially Bride. Booker gets an education he can be proud of but wastes it looking for justice maybe, something he can never achieve. Morrison’s story is about the effects our actions can have on a child and is a cautionary tale.

The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie

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Published 2008

Having read this book I realize that I am not sophisticated, educated or intellectual enough to understand all of the things Mr. Rushdie is saying. He romps through history and religion with rapid grace. There’s magic and myth, stories interwoven and curving back on each other. It’s an entertaining book but not for the faint of heart. Also pretty much x-rated for sexual content and profanity. It takes place during the time of Machiavelli, in Florence but also in the Moghul empire where Akbar the Great is worried about the fate of his empire when it becomes time to hand over the reins to his sons. A foreigner, tall and golden-haired arrives at his court claiming kinship. Maybe this is the answer to his apprehensions about his sons’ suitability for the reins of power of a great kingdom, a kingdom he fights constantly to protect. A princess who chose to go with the conqueror back to Florence rather than to her own home and the protection of her brother was erased from the family history until the stranger begins his tale. It turns out there really was such a princess and the stranger’s story corroborates Akbar’s mother’s memory of the Lady Black Eyes who vanished so long ago.