Review: Mr. White's Confession

Written by Robert Clark
Published by Picador, 1998, 341 pages

That is the sad thing about memory, I suppose. It goes without saying that search as we will, we cannot know the future; but it seems we cannot even know the past, however much we search it; and so we are always longing for it and seeing it beyond our reach, anticipating what is past as though it were to come. In that way, having a memory is terribly sad, like visiting a graveyard, where even at the loveliest of times one must finally confess that underneath the verdure there are only the dead and gone, that which is lost to us, the things we once loved, that we still love. . . . I suppose that is all memory really is, for the most part: the hunger for what we have loved. [p. 301]

Robert Clark’s Mr. White’s Confession is an atmospheric, genre-bending murder mystery, set in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1939. Someone is killing dime-a-dance girls in the city, and Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner is assigned to the case. His investigation soon leads him to a chief suspect – one Herbert White, a local eccentric with memory problems and a taste for “glamour” photography. White was a frequent customer at the dance hall where the two murdered women worked, and had taken their photographs just before they turned up dead. And when the police question him, his answers are unconventional and unsatisfying. Is it possible he’s using his claims of faulty memory to mask his guilt?

The book shifts back and forth between Horner’s investigation of the case and White’s diaries from the period. Herbert keeps detailed diaries and scrapbooks to help him remember things. Because of an injury at birth, he has a very quirky memory – he can recall his childhood and events from long ago, and things that happened within the last day or two, but has trouble with the time between – his “middle-distance” memories. And by the time Horner settles on him as the likely killer, we’ve already gotten to know and care about White through those diaries and scrapbooks – a circumstance which really adds to the suspense and tension of the story. But then there’s always the nagging question: Can we rely on him as a narrator?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The characters – even the minor characters – are all interesting and believable. No one is perfect – even Lieutenant Horner is troubled and flawed. As a mystery novel, it’s probably only half successful, but that’s really not its point. Much more important is its exploration of themes of guilt and innocence, truth and fiction, past and present, love, faith, and memory. Especially memory. As Herbert White writes in his diary:

. . . it seems to me that perhaps at bottom all our knowing, all our seeing, is limited to what we have remembered: What is to come is, after all, beyond our ken; and what is happening at this moment, precisely now, we apprehend only after the moment is past, after it has become a memory. So memory is more than a souvenir of what was and is no more: It is in this sense everything we know and everything we have. [pp. 333-334]

I received this book through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program, although it originally came out in 1998. Before I read it, I wasn’t familiar with Robert Clark’s works. But now I’m a fan. And I’m eager to read his earlier work, In the Deep Midwinter – if only for that wonderful title.

Blog Love

I want to say a big thank-you to Rebecca at The Book Lady’s Blog for awarding my blog the “I **Heart** Your Blog” Award. I love her blog, too – it’s one I read on a regular basis. Her reviews are always thoughtful and fun to read. And I also love her blog’s tagline:

“Forget Freud…This is therapy by the book.”

Well, that’s what blogging and reading is all about, right?

Now I’m supposed to tag seven favorite blogs of my own, so I’ll have to give it some thought. I have so many favorites, it'll be hard to narrow it down to seven. That may take a while, but I’ll see what I can find.

Thanks again, Book Lady!

Challenge Countdown

This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is “catching up.” And one of the things I said I wanted to do was organize the rest of my reading challenges for the year – see what’s left to read, and how long I have to do it.

And after looking at my challenge blog, and checking the spreadsheet record I keep (well, I said I was a Geek, didn't I?), I realize that I still have about fourteen books left to read in the next three months. Actually, it looks like seventeen, but a few of those are cross-over reads, so it’s not quite as formidable as it looks. Well, actually it is pretty formidable at that.

So, the list:

R.I.P. III Challenge (ending October 31) – 2 books. Probably:
The House With a Clock in Its Walls, by John Bellairs, and The Penguin Complete Short Stories of M.R. James. I’m reading both of those right now, and enjoying them a lot.

342,745 Ways to Herd Cats (tl;dr) Challenge (ending November 30) – 1 more book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. I’ve started reading that one, too. Also enjoying it.

Man-Booker Challenge (ending December 31) – 5 books.
I’ve only read one of the six books for this challenge, so I’ve still got those last five to go. But one of them is Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a cross-over with the Herding Cats Challenge – so only four “new” books for this challenge. The other books I’ve got lined up are:

Hotel Du Lac, by Anita Brookner
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor
The Public Image, by Muriel Spark
The Road to Lichfield, by Penelope Lively

Young Readers Challenge (ending in December) – 8 books.
I know this sounds like lot, but kids’ books are usually very quick reads. And one of the books I’ll be reading is another crossover (Bellairs’ The House With a Clock in Its Walls), so only seven “new” titles. I made a list of books when I joined the challenge, but it’s sort of fallen by the wayside – I’ll probably just choose the books as I read them.

I also have the Short Story Challenge finishing up in December. But the M.R. James ghost stories will work there, too.

So, altogether, I think that’s fourteen separate titles. Now the question is will I be able to read (and blog about) almost five books a month for the next three months? All signs point to “NO,” especially since I’ll probably be traveling during a good part of that time. But I’m gonna give it a good solid try.

Booking Through Thursday: Well, That Was Different

This week’s BTT topic:

What was the most unusual (for you) book you ever read? Either because the book itself was completely from out in left field somewhere, or was a genre you never read, or was the only book available on a long flight… whatever? What (not counting school textbooks, though literature read for classes counts) was furthest outside your usual comfort zone/familiar territory?

And, did you like it? Did it stretch your boundaries? Did you shut it with a shudder the instant you were done? Did it make you think? Have nightmares? Kick off a new obsession?

Well, I guess I’d have to go back to a book I read for a class somewhere, sometime. Because I don’t generally read books “from out in left field.” I’m pretty selective about what I read, and if a book is likely to make me shudder, it’s also probably not likely to be one I’ll read. (Unless it’s a book of ghost stories, in which case I’ll actually be hoping for a few shudders.)


Hmmmm. Well, if we’re talking about works of fiction, I suppose the most unusual book (unusual for me, anyway) I’ve ever read would be James Joyce’s Ulysses. At least, that’s the first one that springs to mind. I had to read it for a college class on the modern English novel, many years ago. And now, of course, I’m glad of it – it’s definitely a modern classic and I think everyone interested in modern literature should read it. But it was a real struggle at the time. No, it didn’t kick off a James Joyce obsession. And it only made me think that I was really glad when I’d finished it.


The most unusual book I’ve tried to read but never finished would be Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. The written equivalent of Cubist painting, it’s made up of short pieces supposedly on various subjects such as food, rooms, objects. But reading it is like trying to read a book that’s been chopped up into tiny bits and then had the bits reassembled in random combinations and juxtapositions. I think I understood what Stein was getting at in writing the book, but I finally decided that life is just way too short to spend much of it unraveling her puzzles. A pain is a pain is a pain. . .

Random Notes: Coming Events

If you care about books, this Saturday, September 27th, is notable for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s the date of the 2008 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. I’ve never been to one of these, and I’d like to attend this one, but I’m not making myself any promises. For one thing, I think DC is supposed to be getting a lot of rain on Saturday, and I really can’t think of any authors I’d trudge around in the rain to see. Not any living authors, anyway.

The driving forces behind the Festival are, of course, the Library of Congress and Laura Bush. Over 70 authors are expected on the National Mall, to read, discuss and sign their works – including heavy-hitters like Salman Rushdie, Geraldine Brooks, Neil Gaiman, and Alexander McCall Smith.

For more info, see the Festival website. There’s also a National Book Festival Young Readers' Online Toolkit, which features a Hosting Guide with an overview of the site and ideas for holding local book festivals; an Author Details section including biographies and a “scoop” area that tells “the stories behind their stories”; and the 2008 National Book Festival Poster.


September 27th is also the first day of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (Celebrating the Right to Read). This is the 27th annual observance of the celebration, and it runs through October 4. The ALA has a Frequently Challenged Books webpage with various listings, including the Top 100 Challenged Books of 1990-1999 and 2000-2007. And there's a special Banned Books Week website, with information about local events around the country.

Some of my favorite books are among those listed as frequently banned. Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Flowers for Algernon, The Handmaid's Tale. I suppose I can understand the reasoning there (though I would abhor it). But what about Where's Waldo?? Why the heck would anyone object to that? Obviously, I didn't pick up on the lewd, subversive undertones of the book. While I was ruining my eyesight, scanning every page for the little guy in the striped sweater, I was probably being corrupted and didn't even know it!

Tuesday Thingers: Favorite Authors

For this week’s Tuesday Thingers topic, Boston Bibliophile has some questions about favorite authors, as well as a little photo project:
Who do you have named in your LT account as favorite authors? Why did you choose them? How many people share your choices? Can you share a picture of one of them?

Well, first of all – I have a lot of favorite authors listed. Too many to name here. I’m not going to count them, but I’m sure there are over a hundred. And I chose them . . . because they’re my favorite authors! But also because when I was doing the list, I had just signed up for LT’s Early Reviewer program, and I had a theory that a lengthy list of favorites might help my chances when the mighty algorithm was applied. Don’t know how many people share my choices. Probably a lot. My list is fairly eclectic.

And for a photo, I’ll share this one of Barbara Pym, “borrowed” from the back of the dust jacket to A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, edited by Hazel Holt and Barbara’s sister Hilary Pym. I did check out how many other LT members share my Pym enthusiasm. Forty-six. Should be more.

Related post: Review of Barbara Pym's Civil To Strangers

Review: American Wife

Written by Curtis Sittenfeld
Published by Random House, 2008, 550+ pages
This review refers to an Advance Reader’s Edition of the book

It’s taken me a long time to get this book read. By now, I suppose everybody knows the story. So here’s the shortest synopsis I can come up with: Mild-mannered school librarian (who is not Laura Welch Bush) marries scion of a prominent political family, who turns out to be a future President of the United States (and who is not George Walker Bush), in spite of major social, philosophical and political differences, while at the same time wrestling with the emotional toll of past trauma and indiscretions. A little like a train wreck – it’s disturbing, but you can’t look away. Much too long and rambling, but overall I think it’s an interesting book.

I suppose I should start off by ‘fessing up – I came to this book with a real chip on my shoulder. Well, two chips, actually. First of all there’s the whole George/Laura Bush thing. And then there’s the generation gap thing. OK, three chips – there was also the name thing.

I’ll start with the name thing because that was the most ridiculous and the most quickly remedied. Curtis Sittenfeld. What kind of a name is that for a nice young female author? I was amazed to find that CS was a woman – I’d never heard of her earlier works (I mostly dozed through the early years of this century), so I was all set to read a book written by a male author. Not that I’ve got anything against female authors. Hey, two of my favorite writers are Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark and you can’t get much more female than those two. So, after I got over the initial surprise and feeling slightly deceived, I was able to move on.

For me, the George Bush connection was an enormous problem right at first (not that this is a book about George and Laura Bush, you understand – of course not). I’m probably Dubya’s biggest non-fan. Even before he became our fearless leader and the Decider and all that, the very mention of his name could set me off in an eruption of mindless rants and ravings (my husband said it made me foam at the mouth, but I don’t think that’s literally true). George Bush, after all, represents everything I was glad to leave behind when I migrated away from my home state. And the man isn’t even a real Texan – he was born in Connecticut, for heaven’s sake! See – there I go.

The generation problem was more serious (if not any less idiotic) than the first two hang-ups. Once I found out a little about Sittenfeld and realized she was in her early thirties, I again felt a bit deceived and discomfited. How could someone barely past adolescence presume to write about someone of my generation? To understand and portray what it’s like to have come of age during the turbulence of the sixties and seventies? To say anything meaningful about the doubts and problems of age now facing us Baby Boomers? Or the compromises and adjustments necessary to maintain a marriage over several decades? Authors many years older than Sittenfeld have failed miserably at the task. Who was she to expect to succeed? The hubris of the chick!

Well, after reading American Wife, I have to say I think she did a pretty good job. I felt the book was about a third longer than it really needed to be, but it held my interest all the way through (OK, I skimmed a few sections, but not many). She took a big risk, writing about such a recent period of history, not having lived through it herself. And she mostly got it right. Mostly. A few of the details are a little off – for instance, if I’d showed up at my high school in 1963 (or anywhere, for that matter), wearing a felt skirt or saddle oxfords, I’d have been stripped of my membership in the Youthquake Generation. But these slip-ups are few and far between and wouldn’t really rate a mention, if the book didn’t depend so heavily on a build-up of such period detail.

What she doesn’t do quite so well is persuade me that the Alice/Laura character could be (and remain) so attracted to and sympathetic with the Charlie/George character. From the beginning, they seem to have nothing in common. She’s well-mannered, self-effacing, bookish, and genteel. He’s arrogant, nearly illiterate, boorish, and crude. She’s working class and socially liberal; he’s old-money conservative. I know opposites are supposed to attract (especially in literature), but their relationship really does require a massive suspension of disbelief. I mean, the man has the brain power of a sand dollar, and yet she gives up her career for him! And abandons her best friend to marry him! And stays married to him for thirty years – and bears him a child! Oops, there I go – foaming at the mouth again.