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Post by topbilled on May 4, 2023 13:27:19 GMT
Nice to see a review on a John Marquand book, since we had recently been discussing his works in another thread. Good job!
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Post by Fading Fast on May 4, 2023 13:44:41 GMT
Nice to see a review on a John Marquand book, since we had recently been discussing his works in another thread. Good job! |
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Post by Fading Fast on May 16, 2023 7:17:32 GMT
The Natural by Bernard Malamud, originally published in 1952
The Natural is rightfully considered not just a classic baseball novel, but also a classic American novel, as it explores themes common to the American experience, where individual success or failure is determined by a mix of merit, integrity and fate.
Corruption, greed, honor and sex are also all woven into Malamud's tale of a young baseball talent whose life and career get waylaid for years owing to a senseless act of violence only to have a later resurrection that is equal parts gratifying and disillusioning.
We meet the novel's protagonist, Roy Hobbs, when he is a young professional baseball prospect on a train to a much-anticipated major league tryout. After he has a chance face-off with baseball's greatest hitter of the era, we know that he is a pitching phenom.
A mysterious, attractive and mentally disturbed woman Hobbs meets on the same train later shoots him. She, we learn, has a history of harming promising athletes.
We then reconnect with Hobbs fifteen years later after he has just been signed to the struggling professional baseball team, the New York Knights.
In his return to baseball, Hobbs is now an oddity, a thirty-four-year-old rookie. After overcoming his manager's skepticism to play him, he becomes a star outfielder and hitter who propels the heretofore woebegone Knights into a pennant race.
What follows is a series of personal and professional challenges for Hobbs driven by both his internal demons and external forces as he tries to somehow make up for all those lost years.
Hobbs' natural talent is unquestionable, even at thirty-four and despite never having played major league ball before, he proves to be an elite player. He is devoted to the game mentally and physically, but the pressures and temptations of success begin to interfere with his focus.
Women are one distraction as Hobbs is attracted to the young, pretty, but selfish and greedy niece, the wonderfully named Memo Paris, of the manager, while he talks himself out of liking the older, less-attractive, but good-hearted woman who helps pull him out of a batting slump.
Money too is a distraction as Hobbs is poorly paid because his salary was set for the year before he became a breakout star and, in an era before free agency, he has little negotiating power with the miserly, creepy and corrupt majority shareholder of the team.
As the season approaches the closing weeks of the pennant race and pressures increase, Hobbs, worrying about money, his career and the younger woman, suffers some sort of mental and physical breakdown that could ruin his future.
In a move echoing baseball's famous Black Sox scandal, Hobbs is then tempted with a huge bribe to throw a decisive game; it's enough money to set him up in business post baseball. It proves to be a game that dramatically comes down to his last swing at the plate.
Malamud imbues The Natural with a fantasy-like quality that highlights the timelessness of Hobbs' struggle - a struggle of innate ability, individual drive and personal integrity versus human failings, corrupting influences and the randomness of fate.
Very little is black and white in Malamud's world. Even in a simple pitch or the swing of a bat, life, uncertainty and corruption can rear their heads and mar those seemingly "pure" acts.
In Roy Hobbs we see the American dream both as we wish it to be - a shining city on a hill - and as it is - a complex story full of hope, opportunity, merit, faith, corruption, luck and heartbreak. The Natural isn't the American novel, but it is an American novel.
N.B. While the core story remains, the well-done 1984 movie version of Malamud's tale is changed in meaningful ways. |
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Post by topbilled on May 16, 2023 14:36:52 GMT
Re: THE NATURAL...I didn't realize the book had been written so many years before the movie.
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Post by Fading Fast on May 16, 2023 15:48:59 GMT
Re: THE NATURAL...I didn't realize the book had been written so many years before the movie. |
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Post by sepiatone on May 16, 2023 16:07:02 GMT
IMHO, the movie based on the book "The Natural" was more enjoyable than the book, the major change being the movie Hobbs isn't as much of a dick the novel's Hobbs was.
Sepiatone
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Post by NoShear on May 18, 2023 15:57:43 GMT
Eight Men Out by Elite Asinof, published in 1963
Note: My comments are based on this book, published in '63, which had been considered the "definitive" book on the White Sox scandal for years, but new information has come to light since that expands on the story and contradicts some of Asinof's points. See here "The Black Sox Scandal" for one example of the newer information.
First, a couple of lessons from the book and life: the world was just as corrupt and mendacious in 1919 as it is today. Whatever level of corruption and mendacity you assume, you are too low, then and now.
Surprisingly, the scheme to throw the World Series in return for money was thought up and put in motion by the players who, then, reached out to the gamblers who, even in their line of work, had to be a bit taken back by players, apparently, offering up a fixed World Series on a silver platter. "Anything interesting happen in your day, Dear?"
The eight White Sox players who collaborated on the fix all had their individual motivations - some seemed all about the money, others seemed a bit about the money and a bit about raising a (cloaked) middle finger to a sport and an owner they felt were cheating them.
They weren't wrong. Think what you will about players today landing hundred-plus-million-dollar contracts, the alternative in 1919 was players treated like the owners' chattel who grudgingly paid them a small percentage of their true economic value (as can be seen by the small salaries the players received relative to the large dollar amounts the owners received when they traded a player).
The White Sox Eight felt particularly aggrieved as they believed owner Charles Comiskey was especially penurious versus other owners. Nothing angers a man more than seeing someone else get paid more for doing the same job. To be sure, the players were still paid, in general, three to six times what the average American was making in 1919, but again, nothing infuriates a man more than seeing someone else get paid a larger amount for the same work.
(The article in the link at the top argues this relative-to-other-teams pay disparity noted in Asinof's book did not really exist; regardless, the owners absolutely did "own" the players and captured the majority of their economic value.)
To launch this scheme, the players reached out to the gamblers. The smarter ones (read Abe Rothstein, "The Big Bankroll") kept several arm's lengths between them and the fraud, leaving the day-to-day interaction to the lower-level gambler hacks who made a complete mess of it.
Corrupt activities suffer from a lack of a legal construct to enforce contracts making translating them into action - executing on a plan requiring trust covering large sums of money to be paid over several weeks - incredibly difficult to manage.
None of them - not one of these second-tier gamblers or amateur-crook players - handled this well. Instead of using game theory strategies to build incremental trust, everyone was greedy. The gamblers outright cheated the players which was stupid as the players then lost heart in the scheme.
It turned into a version of Keystone-Cops chaos. The gamblers promised the players upfront money and, then, reneged (in part so that they had more money to actually bet on the game and in part because they held the players in contempt). The players, having decided to cheat and some having already taken some money, had no good response to not getting the said promised money as they had already corrupted themselves and the gamblers always held out the promise of more money "after the next game."
It was particularly fun seeing the players - angry as all heck at the cheating gamblers - lie to the gamblers about their intentions in game three, resulting in most of the gamblers losing their shirts (not Rothstein, though, as he saw the risk of betting on individual games and only bet on the full series).
To be sure, it's a complex moral equation at play when you are rooting for the group of cheaters that got cheated by the other group of cheaters - sigh. A few smart leaders could have managed this scheme much better.
Nipping at everyone's heels all throughout was the media who heard the rumors and smelled the stink, but couldn't get well-sourced-and-confirmed information. Owing to liability concerns, the stories that were printed were vague and qualified.
The somewhat-real story only broke because a few of the cheating (and cheated by the gamblers) players, well into the following season, decided to confess (in a moment driven by a mix of conscience and a desire to hurt others - players and gamblers - who seemed to get away with more money).
Those confessions - made in Chicago to the District Attorney's office - set off a firestorm of public fury and legal machinations. At least by today's standards, everything, including the confessions themselves, were executed in a slipshod, intentionally-disingenuous or outright-crooked manner to tip the outcome one way or another.
The confessing players were duped into signing liability waivers; payoffs (think Rothstein pulling strings from far away) made evidence disappear; other evidence or documents suddenly appeared out of nowhere; investigations were funded by rivals; high-priced attorneys - mysteriously paid - popped up to defend the players and no one would accuse the judge of impartiality.
Out of this poorly aimed circular firing squad came a legal exoneration for the players on, kind of, a technicality. But the public was less kind and Major League Baseball - after its own "investigation -" went into high-dudgeon mode against the players resulting in not one of the eight ever playing in the major leagues again (some did go on to play semi-pro and exhibitions games, etc.).
So what were or are the lessons? The public was cheated as its national pastime - never fully honest to start with - was corrupted in its marquee event by some of its marquee players. The expression "Say it ain't so, Joe," referencing famous Shoeless Joe Jackson's role, sadly came into the American lexicon.
The owners were greedy bullies who were handed a scandal owing, in part, to their greed and bullying.
The cheating players were cogs ground down by the owners, but again, most professional ballplayers didn't cheat and earning a multiple of what the average American earned minimizes one's sympathy for those who did cheat.
The newspapers somehow, for the most part, missed the biggest sports and cultural story of its day until it was handed to them.
The gamblers - well, few go into the gambling racket because they have a high regard for the law and, as in every "profession," there are the smart ones who rise to the top (Rothstein) and the hacks who were handed an easy victory but made one unforced error after another until they lost the game.
If there's less fixing of games today and less gambling by players, etc., it's not because human nature has improved, it's because the the vast sums of legal money that sluices to everyone involved in Major League Baseball today reduces the incentive to risk it all on cheating. But as we've learned, some still do and aways will.
Despite the new information since its publication, Eight Men Out is still an excellent place to start one's discovery of, perhaps, the sports world's most notorious scandal: a scandal that revealed as much about America in 1919 and human nature always as it did about the sport of baseball itself.
(Comments on the excellent 1988 movie version of the book can be found here: "Eight Men Out")
Fading Fast, your review is worthy of Happy Felsch's strutful last word. |
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Post by kims on Jun 6, 2023 0:18:15 GMT
pages back was review of MR. S: MY LIFE WITH FRANK SINATRA written by George Jacobs (the me in the title) and Bill Stadiem.
Most reviews said "gossipy" and one used "trashy" in the favorable reviews. It's a fast read, bordering on salacious. Chapter 2 when Jacobs switches from working for agent Lazar to Sinatra, he discusses Frank's penis. Well, I knew what the rest of the book would be like. I would say that the basics of Jacobs story is true, but I think embellished for guilty pleasure reading.
While with Lazar, he travels to London and they stay at Claridges. Jacobs ends up with the big suite, Lazar with a small room because Claridges thinks Jacobs is an African prince. Claridges is noted for knowing their guest to be able to provide for their wants. A little surprised that they don't realize their error, odder still Lazar, who presumably is paying lets this slide.
Another surprise for me was that Jacobs was allowed to stay a Vegas hotel in the 60s when Sammy Davis was banned. Jacob's stories are related in a way that seems he is accepted by all as another of the crowd not a valet. Noel Coward takes Jacobs to a show in London when Lazar doesn't want to go. That is surprising when after reading one of his autobiographies and a book compiling his letters, Coward generously pays for tickets for his staff to go to shows, but not attend with Coward.
After the synopsis of the book advertising it for sale reveal what the contents will be and the review earlier posted, I did not put it high on my reading list-I recall Frank Jr. declaring it character assasination material. But after reading the review here, I came across an interview with one of the authors that Nancy approved the writing of the book.
I still take the book with a grain of salt. If Jacobs was mingling with all these people, curious that there are few to no mentions of him in the books about those people and I've only seen one photo of him at any of the episodes mentions.
It's a fast entertaining read, but I think it was written more for gossip than accuracy.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 10, 2023 6:05:27 GMT
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, originally published in 1933
The 1934 movie version of the mystery/detective novel The Thin Man is so famous that there is all but no way to read the book itself with a tabula rasa; instead, you read it almost as a view into how Hollywood transforms a novel into a screenplay and then a movie.
Trying though, as one must, to take the book The Thin Man on its own, it holds up well, but it is still in total, a bit of a lesser effort than its movie version.
Hammett's writing has an almost Hemingwayesque sparceness that keeps the story moving along. Plus the charmingly playful relationship between the lead character Nick Charles and his wife Nora makes the novel equal parts detective story and light comedy.
The detective story, however, is the ostensible plot of the book and, just like in the movie, it's confusing as heck with a lot of players, feints, clues and tangles. Good for you if you figure it out, but even if you don't (like I didn't) the ride is the real fun here.
Nick Charles, a handsome and suave former private detective, is married to Nora, a wealthy, pretty and young socialite. They live in San Francisco where Nick looks after Nora's extensive inherited business interests.
In this one, Hammett's first entry in the series, his fun-loving married couple, along with their spirited wire-haired fox terrier, Asta, is currently visiting Nick's former stomping ground, New York City.
Here, some of Nick's old and not-social-register friends - a collection of cops, gangsters, general scammers, a dicey lawyer and some nouveau riche - try to rope Nick into helping solve the murder of the estranged wife of one of Nick's prior acquaintances.
You can try and follow the complex murder mystery, which includes a cat's cradle of lovers, angry offspring, former spouses, a bigamist, swindlers, the mob, an oddball inventor and a few other picaresque characters, or just enjoy the fun personalities.
If you do the latter, front and center will be Nick and Nora. This is a married couple that likes each other, but they also have fun ribbing each other. Nora also loves Nick's Runyonesque circle, a far cry from the social registry world, we assume, she grew up in.
Gangsters, gamblers, gunmols, "speaks," gold diggers, "joints," bounders, "flatfoots," police interrogations and more are all a new circus that Nora looks at with amazement, but without condescension.
Nick equally appreciates that his well-bred wife has a taste for the "colorful" side of life. When the ribbing gets going, she gives as good as she gets. This is a couple in love who doesn't make you want to puke; instead, you want to hang out with them.
It helps that, with Nora's money, they live a very comfortable lifestyle of doormen, Pullman coaches, taxicabs, penthouses, fine attire and, of course, cocktails at all hours, especially since their regular schedule has them waking at midday and going to bed at dawn.
The narrative itself is an equal mix of mystery and fun. Nick and Nora become part of the investigation, but it has a lighthearted romp feel as, with their odd assortment of friends and hanger-oners, they get into harmless and not-harmless scrapes along the way.
The movie and book are both good, but the movie gets the nod. The book doesn't have enough descriptions of the settings, milieu and New York itself to make it come as alive as it does on screen. In the book, it sometimes feels like the story is just "floating" somewhere.
Hammett describes something once in his novel and then is done describing that place or person forever. It asks a lot of the reader to carry all that in his/her head throughout the story, especially as the reader is busy trying to untangle a complex mystery.
Throughout the movie, though, you see Nick and Nora, dressed to the nines, going to atmosphere-rich nightclubs, dives, murder scenes and elsewhere as they interact with Nick's motley collection of "associates."
With on-screen Nick and Nora shooting each other telling looks, while Nora, played wonderfully by Myrna Loy, occasionally wrinkles her cute nose, the movie provides a visual engagement that Hammett's terse descriptions can't match.
The Thin Man story is fun as both a book and movie because Hammett created an irresistible pair of "detectives" who also have one of the best ever fictional marriages. It's just a quirk of media that his literary creation found its fullest expression on the screen and not the page.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 19, 2023 6:17:35 GMT
B.F.'s Daughter by John P MarQuand originally published in 1946
"Nobody cares about a girl on a yacht." - Tom Brett to Polly Fulton
B.F.'s Daughter examines this statement as we follow the life of a young girl, Polly Fulton, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Born into a world of money - big houses, chauffeurs, maids, private schools, etc. - in the Depression, Polly struggles to create her own identity and space in a world that maybe doesn't care that much about a girl on a metaphorical yacht.
A just-out-of-college Polly shocks her father, a self-made man with a kind heart, an endless interest in everything and a personality that just takes over if allowed, by breaking her engagement to Bob Tasmin, a born-to-a-good-family, up-and-coming lawyer who is also a nice guy and sincerely in love with Polly, to marry a left-wing teacher and writer, Tom Brett.
Why does Polly do this? She doesn't even really know herself, but somehow "feels" that life has been made too easy for her and that Tom - good with words, but not people or life - will need her more than Bob, which will give her life real meaning. We'll see shortly how that works out.
If you think this is going to be a book about capitalism versus socialism or even about a dominating industrialist versus a radical intellectual, as I thought at first, you'll realize later on that their roles here are to provide antipodes for Polly to measure herself against. To that end, the book takes a reasonably balanced view of both men: a refreshing approach in what is usually a world, then and now, that makes one all good and one all evil.
But back to our girl on the yacht, um, Polly. Despite her stated willingness to renounce her father's money, both she and (surprisingly) Tom accept the generous allowance her dad gives her upon her marriage, which Polly uses to support Tom in a very comfortable lifestyle while he goes on fighting for the working class.
Polly likes saying she doesn't care about money, but she seems to enjoy having it. After several good years of married life, we find Tom as a bigwig "New Dealer" in Washington before and during WWII with Polly in New York always waiting for Tom to come home.
Fed up with waiting, the book climaxes as Polly goes to Washington to spend a weekend with Tom where we see how strained their relationship has become. Tom's needs and selfishness now grate on Polly, while her smothering desire to "help" him drives him away. It's a marriage where no one is all right or all wrong, but you know it's on the rocks. Another big blow comes when Polly learns that Tom has been having an affair.
Polly learns, it is not a fling, but a long-term relationship where - and this crushes Polly - Tom finds comfort in a frumpy secretary who idolizes him. Simultaneously, Polly runs into her former fiancé, the now-married Bob Tasmin, an Army planner based in Washington.
A decade after she broke their engagement, Polly now sees Bob's quiet, inherent decency and character as qualities she too casually dismissed years ago for Tom's fiery passion and needy personality. But as Bob tells her, she needed to marry Tom for herself even if her marriage is failing and even if, and here Polly takes another blow, she's at fault for smothering Tom in her world of luxury, which undermined Tom's sense of self worth.
That's a lot for Polly to unpack as she decides whether to fight for her marriage or move on. And we'll leave that outcome for those who want to read the book. But what about the girl on the yacht and do we care? Author Marquand argues we should, but you'll have to decide for yourself if the problems of this not-her-fault spoiled rich girl struggling with life, but always having a safety net of money to fall back into, are worth caring about.
N.B., I found my way to the book via the movie version of B.F.'s Daughter (comments here: "B.F.'s Daughter" ), which, owing to the Motion Picture Production Code, changed or palliated so much of the story that I sought out the book knowing there had to be a better story buried under the movie's limitations - and there was. Plus, both the well-written book and engaging movie are a fun enough time capsule of a small slice of the '30s and '40s to be worth the effort. |
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Post by Andrea Doria on Jun 19, 2023 10:24:41 GMT
Thanks for the two reviews of "B.F.'s Daughter," Fading Fast! It's great to be able to compare book and film this way.
I'm particularly interested in the difference between an affair with a frumpy woman and helping a blind woman as the screen writers must have preferred. In the movie we see Polly's attitude toward her rival change instantly when she realizes the woman is blind. Were we supposed to think Tom couldn't possibly be having an affair with the woman because she had a disability? That bothered me a little. I think 'frumpy' woman is much better because it doesn't cloud the point which was that he wanted to be needed and enjoyed the comfort of a relationship in less demanding surroundings. I think this was done well in, "About Mrs. Leslie," where handsome business man, Robert Ryan has a long affair with Shirley Booth.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 19, 2023 12:04:48 GMT
Thanks for the two reviews of "B.F.'s Daughter," Fading Fast! It's great to be able to compare book and film this way.
I'm particularly interested in the difference between an affair with a frumpy woman and helping a blind woman as the screen writers must have preferred. In the movie we see Polly's attitude toward her rival change instantly when she realizes the woman is blind. Were we supposed to think Tom couldn't possibly be having an affair with the woman because she had a disability? That bothered me a little. I think 'frumpy' woman is much better because it doesn't cloud the point which was that he wanted to be needed and enjoyed the comfort of a relationship in less demanding surroundings. I think this was done well in, "About Mrs. Leslie," where handsome business man, Robert Ryan has a long affair with Shirley Booth.
Again, from my wobbly memory, I think, in the book, he's got a complex relationship with B.F.'s money as he likes what it can do for him and likes the lifestyle it provides, but he is angry that he feels that way so he blames the money and Polly for giving it to him. It's not fair for him to think that way, but I think that was part of how Tom felt.
As I'm writing this, I think I disliked Tom for that part of his personality in the book, but Polly also used the money as a weapon knowing how it angered her husband. Obviously, this was once the relationship started to sour. |
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Post by topbilled on Jun 19, 2023 14:52:57 GMT
Thanks for sharing your review of Marquand's novel. I particularly like this comment, since it explains the character of Polly Fulton and her conflicts more clearly:
If you think this is going to be a book about capitalism versus socialism or even about a dominating industrialist versus a radical intellectual, as I thought at first, you'll realize later on that their roles here are to provide antipodes for Polly to measure herself against.
I agree with Andrea's comment that the movie makes it seem like Tom wouldn't possibly have an affair with a blind woman (why not??) and that Polly too quickly dismisses that notion when she meets the Dutch girl.
What I did like about the movie's approach in this regard is how if Tom is innocent and NOT having an affair, he doesn't quite come out and tell Polly, he knows she has to realize the truth for herself. But also it is like Tom is trying to keep a good deed from Polly. So in a way, he is helping the Dutch girl in a "noble" way, just like Polly was helping him in a noble but misguided way when they were first married and she was using her father's money to finance Tom's lecture tour.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 27, 2023 6:08:45 GMT
White Banners by Lloyd C. Douglas originally published in 1936
White Banners is an engaging novel that combines a story about a Midwest family's struggles in the early 1900s with a spiritual overlay owing to the family's wise and good-natured housekeeper who preaches an ardent turn-the-other-cheek philosophy.
Father and husband Paul Ward is a professor of literature and a frustrated inventor in his spare time. Marcia, his wife, is overwhelmed by the demands of housekeeping and caring for their three children. The ends of their budget do not meet. The Ward family needs help.
Help arrives one day in the form of Hannah, a middle-aged woman and drifter who lands on their doorstep in a snowstorm. She then all but hires herself as their housekeeper. Hannah's calm and prudent management immediately turns the house around by running it efficiently.
Hannah, though, is much more than a good housekeeper, she has a spiritual quality that allows her to see what people need to do and she helps them to do it. But Hannah isn't operating from instinct, she has a philosophy that even she admits is hard to explain.
It's an extreme version of turn-the-other cheek, but as Hannah explains, the idea is you do it for yourself, not for the person who harmed you. Turning the other cheek, she avers, frees you from effort spent fighting, which allows you to accomplish more over a lifetime.
Effectively, when harmed, you put up the titular white banner - declare defeat - and start over. If someone steals, say, your successful invention, as happens to Paul, Hannah says forget it and invent something superior as you and the world will be better off.
Even though you want to fight back - you want to punch the person who punches you first or hire lawyers to reclaim your stolen patent - you shouldn't as you will accomplish more in life and more for others if you just walk away and accept defeat.
Hannah acknowledges it's a hard philosophy to understand and harder still to practice. We only learn about this outlook as we see the Ward family and Hannah go through life's ups and downs.
Author Lloyd C. Douglas shines at creating characters whose regular-life struggles are engaging. Paying bills, worrying over a sick child, disappointments at work and all the other small and large challenges of life are absorbing dramas in Douglas' hands.
As years pass, we learn about Hannah's complicated background, which includes a divorce and having to give up her baby owing to financial distress. We learn how that led to her unique outlook on life and her arrival at the Ward's doorstep one snowy morning.
White Banners is a long novel that, other than in a few passages, moves quickly as the Ward family and Hannah hold your attention with their ups and downs, loves and losses, and financial setbacks and victories.
When the story progresses to its climax (no spoilers coming), it gets a bit complicated and less believable as Hannah's past and the Ward's present get tangled up with Hannah's pacifist philosophy guiding the way.
Still, White Banners is a rewarding read if you enjoy novels about regular families whose lives are altered by a spiritual change agent.
You'll be asking yourself if Hannah is one of the special people who seems to have been touched from above or if she is just a kind woman with a quirky pacifist philosophy born from her particular life experiences.
For us today, White Banners also serves as time travel to early twentieth century America where we get a chance to see the lifestyle, norms, customs and even technology of that era without any of our modern biases intruding as they do in period novels.
N.B. White Banners was made into a 1938 movie starring Fay Bainter, Claude Rains and Bonita Granville, but the novel's story was both shortened and meaningfully altered to meet the demands of a ninety-minute movie. It's a very good movie, but quite different in many ways from the novel.
My comments on the 1938 movie White Banners here: "White Banners" |
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Post by Fading Fast on Jul 9, 2023 5:29:59 GMT
The World of Henry Orient by Nora Johnson originally published in 1956
One could read the novel The World of Henry Orient as nothing more than a story about two young, spirited, upper-middle-class thirteen-year-old girls coming of age in 1950s Manhattan, but that would miss author Nora Johnson's keen observations on adulthood and life.
The fun in this one is the two silly, but also insightful-beyond-their-years girls, Marion Gilbert and Valerie Boyd. Boyd, a child prodigy pianist with wealthy globetrotting parents, has been left in another family's care while she attends the progressive Norton Day School for Girls.
There she meets somewhat introverted Gilbert and the two become fast and close friends in the way only kids at that age can. Since these are Manhattan kids who have well-off and liberal parents/guardians, they have an incredible amount of freedom for adventures.
Those adventures include unsupervised bus rides all over the city, plus trips to museums, movies, record stores, etc. They eat in diners and drugstores and stay out alone into the evening. It's a free-spirited kid's picture-postcard ideal of growing up in Manhattan.
After indulging us with the fun details of being teenage girls in the playground of Manhattan, Johnson, knowing just the right details to pick, starts to examine the girls' lives and challenges, where we see it's not all fun and games.
Boyd, despite her nonchalant attitude, is a troubled young girl trying to come to terms with how her high IQ and piano virtuosity makes her different. Her struggles aren't helped by her absentee parents.
Gilbert, being raised by her divorced mom who lives with her "friend" Mrs. Booth - the lesbian angle is only hinted at - has her own "I'm different" and father-abandonment issues.
With two supportive adults at home, though, who provide discipline, while also allowing her to be the kid she wants to be, Gilbert is reasonably well adjusted. Her stable homelife and more-passive personality have her, often, playing wingman to Boyd's adventurous mind.
Their scattershot adventures become a singularly focused one when Boyd develops a crush on Henry Orient, a middle-aged concert pianist the girls see perform at Carnegie Hall. After that, their lives center around investigating Orient's life in a Harriet the Spy way.
Things change, though, when Boyd's parents swoop into town as her mother is an insecure control freak who parents Boyd in bursts of hyperactivity that tosses her daughter mentally and physically all over the place.
The story subtly shifts now as we see that these girls, Boyd, in particular, but Gilbert, too, use their adventures to escape thinking about their insecurities and the failings of their parents that they are now old enough to be aware of.
In a very modern way of thinking, Gilbert, a product of a divorce, at a time when that was a big deal, and of an atypical homelife, is shown as better adjusted than Boyd whose married parents, as we learn, have a distrustful and combative marriage that has scarred Boyd.
Ostensibly a story about two girls playing in Manhattan, The World of Henry Orient is also an insightful look at how hard childhood is, especially for kids who come from "different" homes or simply don't want to fit into the "model" schools and, often, parents want.
Boyd and Gilbert are special girls who are perceptive beyond their years, but they are also real. They might be exceptional kids, but like children in a Muriel Spark's novel, they maintain the essence of childhood.
Johnson wrote a book that works on two levels as you can just enjoy the girls playing in Manhattan, which is a good story by itself. You can also see, though, all the pressure that school, parents, friends and the culture at large put on young girls.
This makes the book dated and not at all dated. While the rarified world of 1950s upper-middle-class girls in Manhattan attending a "progressive" private school is foreign to most of us, the challenges the girls face and their insecurities are nearly universal and timeless.
The World of Henry Orient is a fun, short page-turner that has astute insights into the pressures and insecurities of childhood, especially for smart children from atypical homes who are on the cusp of becoming young women.
N.B. The World of Henry Orient was turned into a 1964 movie of the same name, but the story was changed a bit as it has a greater emphasis on the character of Henry Orient, perhaps because he is played by Peter Sellers. The movie is good; the book is better. |
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