The Alienist

The Whole by John Reed 90’s. If malapropisms make you laugh out loud, you will have fun with this book. Thing, the blond hottie and main character, can’t seem to get out a sentence without one. Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who fell down the rabbit hole, was a good bit brighter and a lot less narcissistic. Still, there are similarities: a mysterious hole has opened up and a mysterious rabbit is ever at the ready with pink cocktails. Now I will show I went to graduate school. In An Anatomy of Criticism , Northrup Frye invents a comprehensive way to categorize literary works. One way to divide works up is by modes. In the ironic mode the author and the reader are co-conspirators, viewing the fictional characters as less than they are. If a character’s name is Thing, I guess we must be deep into the ironic mode. Thing is an object, but one with some feelings – she wants to be famous, rich and idolized. Okay, those are feelings. As I remember John Reed, he was not particularly into French. I am happy to see that despite my own failure to reach him, he nonetheless learned some French, enough to let the modern Ms. Malaprop say, as she goes off with a married couple that she’s willing to try a “fromage à trois.” Also, an unusual person has a certain “Je ne suis pas.” (Descartes would have loved that!). It would take a Northrup Frye to catalog all the swipes at modern society and all the inventive twists as the hole grows and we are bound to fall down in it. There’s social criticism here, there’s a great sense of fun, and there may even be a bit of metaphysics, which I’m afraid is too deep for me.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson ff. Sometimes this book seemed to me to be an early twentieth-century translation of a recently unearthed work of Homer. (“. . .hardly did dawn extend a rosy finger to caress the sky before . . . .” ) Like Odysseus, the hero Demane, a demigod and a sorcerer, embarks on a treacherous journey, but not for home (set out of reach somewhere in the skies) but for loot in Olorum City, which lies on the other side of Mother of Waters. Beside the road from Mother of Waters Station to Olorum are the perilous Wildeeps, inhabited by a larger-than-life monster, the green jook-touthed tiger known as the jukiere. Very scary; I mean it –you do not want to meet this beast. All of the characters are men except for Auntie, who is ever present in Demane’s mind, and as far as I can tell they are also all African. Demane and another demigod, Captain, are discreetly in love; the intensity of their passion is deftly conveyed through brief touches, the use of a forbidden first name, and the rare erotic memory. Fighting provides plenty of opportunity for valor. The prose is an amazing lush baroque. Captain, rescuing some comrades “swooped in, with the same acts dealing death and deliverance. The point edge of his spear opened red lips in one bandit’s throat. Lifesblood emptied from the new mouth, while the other bandit took the same blow’s downstroke, which cored his heart.” Demane has a true superpower and it is his sense of smell. I would love to see this story make it to the big or little screen, but somehow it would lack something with only sound and sight. Smells dominate many scenes I found the ambiguous ending intriguing. The reader will doubtless be tuning in for the sequel.

Grievous by H. S. Cross mid 80’s ff. Grievance takes place five years after Wilberforce in the same British boarding school, where intrigue and rule-breaking lurk behind the austere and punitive surface. John Grieves, the housemaster whose appearance so tantalized us in Wilberforce, now reappears with his character, foibles, addiction even, thoroughly fleshed out. The student who takes center stage is Thomas Gray Riding, whose academic talent and outward compliance mask a troubled soul longing for courtly adventure and love. The suffocating atmosphere of the school is relieved by letters Riding receives from Grieves’ goddaughter, Cordelia, and those Grieves receives from her ailing mother who is traveling the continent, encountering quacks, in search of a cure. Completing the love pentagon? hexagon? is Riding’s mother, who also writes to Grieves. This is a long book with many twists. Sometimes it seems like a carnival carousel; with dizzying speed, we are jostled from one perspective to the next. At other times, this work seems structured like a spiral, beginning with a large cast and coiling inward until only the main players are left standing -- moving from a full complement of boys in all the forms, faculty and administration, and female friends to a small, intensely connected few. Through the use of multiple points of view we perceive the texture and associative process of each character’s mind. In one passage, Grieves compares his sense of failure to a murder of crows. From this somewhat familiar phrase, he riffs, using lesser known expressions of animal clusterings as similes for his emotional state: “a sleuth of bears,” “a scold of jays,” “an unkindness of ravens.” Life goes on; Grieves dances with his goddaughter. He goes to a club with annoying peers. We forget about his amusing quirk of thought. Then, suddenly, he is struck by a reoccurring pain in his neck “like an ambush of tigers.” The innermost point of the spiral is not the school, locus of most of the action, but rather a nearby cottage rented by Riding’s mother. The last three who wind up in this house seem to be groping to shape a social unit more primal and more natural than the boarding school. That would be the family. I am overwhelmed by the ambitiousness of this project, by its complex, brooding original characters, by the intricacy of the web of secrets, hidden rivalries, and generous collaborations. As to the range of human emotions, love, loyalty, disappointment and grief (grief of course) abound.