Reading Diary

A few quick shots...One of Trollope's excellences is that he is frequently laugh-out-loud funny; I notice this increasingly as I proceed through Can You Forgive Her? But he is also quite equal to intensely dramatic scenes, such as Kate and George Vavasor's walk on the fells in Chapter 57, with its unexpected distressing outcome. Trollope's take on George's psychology here is reminiscent of Dickens's insights into Bradley Headstone in the closing chapters of Our Mutual Friend -- and that is high praise indeed, for Headstone is one of the most memorably presented "evil" (unbalanced) characters in all of 19th century fiction...The closing chapters of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night are also a distressing experience, as Dick Diver Loses It, and they must have been hard for Fitzgerald to write, as the themes of alcoholism and decayed charm and diminished financial capacity were very close to the bone for him. One never forgets the early passage

Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself..."You see," said Dick smugly, "I'm the only one."

in the light of his eventual decline:

"There are those who can drink and those who can't. Obviously Dick can't. You ought to tell him not to."

----------------------------------

But Nicole was annoyed -- everything he did annoyed her now.

----------------------------------

"He's not received anywhere any more," the woman said.

----------------------------------

"I guess I'm the Black Death," he said slowly. "I don't seem to bring people happiness any more."

The drifting apart of Dick and Nicole Diver has the sadness of any break-up ("It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other"), but has an added sting because of the cruel perception from the rich characters that Dick, who lived the high life on Nicole's money, was in the end analysis "Not Our Kind Dearie," because he was not born rich himself:

"We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions," [Nicole's sister] remarked. "When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up."

Now that's an "Ouch!" And the notion is illustrated in two final, devastating paragraphs, in which Dick drifts from city to town to small town to hamlet in upstate New York, never finding his footing, sending shorter and shorter communications, until he evaporates altogether:

...in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

Tender Is the Night, by the way, has been filmed twice: with Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones in 1962 (Jones at 43 way old for her part, Robards not conventionally handsome enough for his...I'm having a hard time imagining this being good); with Peter Strauss and Mary Steenburgen, which sounds like ideal casting, as a mini-series for cable television in 1985. I intend to track the latter version down somehow, although it has never been commercially available...I finished my first paperback from the wonderful imprint Hard Case Crime, a reissue of Richard Powell's 1953 suspense novel Say It with Bullets. Powell, an accomplished genre and mainstream novelist, had a considerable way with prose:

There was Deputy Sheriff Carson Smith, on leave of absence from a dude ranch advertisement.

-----------------------------------

There wasn't enough water around here for a duck to make a forced landing.

This is a smooth, entertaining read, nicely set on a bus tour through the towns and attractions of the West (Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, Reno, Yosemite). The protagonist, Bill Wayne, is a little slow on the uptake, and I did spot the "solution" a ways off, but I loved the book.