Thursday, April 27, 2017

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP (the movie) – Robert Redford, dir.

The Company You Keep, the novel by Neil Gorden won rave reviews. Critics, from what I found online, pretty much ganged up and panned the movie, by and with Robert Redford.


It didn't do badly at the box office, returning more than double its $2 million production costs. I hadn't known of The Company You Keep, book or movie, when I spotted the DVD in a rack at Dollar General. The big-name cast—including Redford, Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, and Chris Cooper--and the story sold me. I took it back to my apartment and watched it. Twice. Then I bought the book, and read it through with pauses only to pee, eat, or sleep. Took me a couple of days. I'll no doubt read it again in the near future. I'm considering watching the movie again too, any day now.
Not being a student of film, my infrequent movie viewings are for entertainment only. I do not watch with a critical eye, and, appreciating the ancient practice of male actors portraying females, am more than willing to suspend natural disbelief on the silver screen. It did not bother me in the least, as evidently it did some critics, that seventy-six-year-old Redford played the 40-year-old lead as the outed Weather Underground fugitive with a seven-year-old daughter. I had the sense critics who made much of this were less concerned with Redford's age than resentful of Redford's persistence in the industry. For the record, I've always been resentful of the bastard's beauty, but, as I said, I can see past such distractions in the fantasyland of disbelief.
The other complaint was the talking: too much explaining and arguing about political issues in a long ago context. Again, this didn't distract me. Maybe the critics, younger folks I suspect, found it too old and musty to work. I found it vitally relevant, to the story and to me. I was politically aware in the '70s. I participated in some of the anti-war activities on campus. I fantasized fugitive Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn showing up at my apartment desperate for shelter, which, of course, I would gladly provide. The explaining and arguing awakened my nostalgia. Much of it is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. I have to wonder if these film critics bothered to read the novel, in which the explaining and arguing seemed to take up most of the plot.
The novel is more complex and fascinating as story. Redford's movie took a small part of that story, streamlined it, and turned it into a thinking person's thriller (I don't believe a gun appears at all, and it is completely explosion-free). In one deviation from the novel, the Redford character's wife is mentioned only in passing as dead from a car crash. In the novel she's crucial to the plot, which involves a bitter custody battle for the seven-year-old girl. It's the reason the main protagonist—the outed Weather fugitive—abandons his law practice to find his fugitive former girlfriend and persuade her to surrender to clear him of charges in a bank robbery in which a guard was killed. So he can keep the daughter away from his drug-addict ex-wife.
In the movie, the Redford character simply wants to avoid prison so he can raise the daughter, whom he leaves with relatives while he hunts for his ex-girlfriend. Admittedly this weakens the plot, as noted by some critics. The book version is more plausible. Probably just as well I saw the movie before reading the book. I'll watch it again tonight to see how much this matters. 


 

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP – Neil Gordon

Here's how it feels to disappear: "The tunnel, we called it. At the beginning you are straight, and at the end you are underground. A long, clean passage away from everyone who knew you, unnoticed and unremarked. If it works right, absolutely nothing happens, and yet, at the other end, you are in another world. Your legal identity is changed. Your appearance is changed. And because there are no witnesses to either transformation, you are, now, literally, someone else."

Sounds fun, easy. And it's safe to assume Neil Gordon knew what he was talking about when he wrote The Company You Keep, considering he had help from such iconic members of the '70s Weather Underground as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, as well as those "who spoke to me, with such generous honesty, on condition of anonymity." These heavyweight sources along with his characters' intimate references to such highly publicized events as the Days of Rage in Chicago and the Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion, bring a viscerally authentic feel to Gordon's imaginary story. The Company You Keep is a cornucopia of hard-proven survival tips: how to manage fear and panic, and distinguish between the two, how to run, how to hide.
It seems more than coincidental that the story itself brings to mind a particular event in which two Weather members—Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert--were given lengthy prison terms for their roles as getaway drivers in the 1981 Brink's robbery in Rockland County, N.Y., in which two police officers and a security guard were killed. They left a 14-month-old son, Chesa, to be raised by Ayers and Dohrn. Gordon also acknowledges Chesa, a former Rhodes scholar and now a public defender attorney in San Francisco, for his contributions to The Company You Keep. It may appear to some readers that Chesa Boudin's contributions were more significant than those of any other to the central story.

Chesa Boudin

The novel unfolds as a series of emails to Isabel Montgomery, the 17-year-old daughter of a man known ten years earlier as “Jim Grant,” a civil rights attorney in Albany, N.Y. Grant flees, leaving Isabel with relatives, when a local newspaper reporter stumbles onto his true identity: Jason Sinai, a Weather fugitive of nearly thirty years, wanted as a getaway driver in a bank robbery in which a guard was killed. Sinai goes underground again, this time to find and persuade his former Weather girlfriend, Mimi Lurie, also a fugitive from her role in the robbery, to surrender and clear him of the charges. His alibi? He skipped the robbery and was delivering their baby to friends to raise while he and Lurie went their separate ways with new identities.
Ayers and Dohrn
Now, ten years later, Sinai, Lurie, their close associates and the reporter are giving Isabel their accounts of these fugitive years in the hope of persuading her to return from England to testify in Lurie's parole hearing.
Ayers and Dohrn
The email scheme is arranged so each member of the group receives each email at the same time Isabel receives it in England. This allows for various often contradictory accounts to be told without interference. It's an effective literary device, as well, enabling Gordon to revisit that dangerously contentious decade of ideological and political passions. To this end, two questions dominate:
1 – Did the fight matter?
2 – When all boils down to essence, which value stands above the other, truth or love?
Gordon's characters continue their impassioned debate nearly forty years later. The tone has matured, as have the ideas that drove them. Sinai's reflections to his daughter struck me as the most poignant:
In a bar in Dexter, remembering with drunken clarity the rage that had animated me a quarter century ago when I was barely older than you are now, and the freedom I’d glimpsed, one day, in this same bar. It was that I couldn’t stand the roles available to me. I couldn’t stand it: doctor, lawyer, professor, politician. Living and dying in the compromises of my parents. Nothing that was available to me in my parents’ expectations could offer me a way out. I could make more money, I could have greater exposure. I couldn’t, however, be any more involved than they were, nor could I be any less of a phony. Unless I got out. [...]
I had been waiting too long, I knew. I had been drinking too much: after years of not drinking, the beer was buzzing in my ears, and my vision had the clarity of real drunkenness. And yet it was there, sitting in this bar in Dexter, that for the first time in twenty years and more I remembered what it was we had fought for, what it was we had risked our lives and even worse, made fools of ourselves for. It was for this feeling: this feeling of clarity, of courage, of strength—of freedom.
And this, to the reporter who outed him, merely for a story--objective, but privately leaning toward sympathy:
You know, Benny, it was the best dream we ever had. That these motherfuckers could be made to stop. That the machine, the corporate machine, the government machine, the war machine, that it could be turned off. That real rights of real people could come before money. That ecology could come before corporations. It was the best dream we ever had, ever, and it put us in the same company as all the other people around the world who had the same dream; all the people who’ve dreamt the same dream in all the history of mankind. From the very beginning. [...]
Our government has rolled over that dream, every single day since the sixties. Every single day it’s gotten worse. The poor are poorer, the rich are whiter, and the world is a worse place than it’s ever been before. [...]
It was the best dream any of us ever had, and that it failed, Benny, that the machine rolled on over the poor and the blacks at home and all Latin America and Africa and all of the people who so detest us abroad, it didn’t have to happen that way. [...] All we ever asked them to do was to practice the fundamental principles of constitutional democracy, like they always said they would. And that they wouldn’t…it’s so sad, I can’t tell you.



As to the question of truth v. love, these discussions play out between the genders—Sinai and Lurie debating whether to abandon an admittedly futile fight against “the machine” so he can raise his child; the reporter and the Republican woman he's come to love. Gordon's characters don't go preachy here, wielding Plato or Christ or Socrates or Buddha or Vonnegut or Lennon or Dylan or...you may join in here if you like. He lets the reporter, the pushy, nosy, cynical, smartass reporter, have the last word on this one:
“Truth or love? Fuck truth.”

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]


Thursday, April 20, 2017

THE AX – Donald E. Westlake

 Almost afraid to admit it in a crime fiction community, but The Ax is the first of Donald E. Westlake's many highly acclaimed novels I've read. Doubly dangerous to be posting my report on this blog, risking its being seen by my literary advisor, Fictionaut's Kitty Boots, who most certainly would allow an inquiring eyebrow to ascend over a second consecutive popular crime novel in this space instead of something more literary. To her I would appeal for lenience in that both The New York Times and Washington Post critics raved in their reviews of The Ax. D. Keith Mano in the Times presumably stifled a gasp at its "excruciating brilliance." Too, Ms. Boots likes dark, and The Ax, as one might guess from its title, is indubitably dark. Right from its opening sentence: "I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being."

Soon enough our narrator is watching a TV news account of two of his murders:
It’s strange, but someway or other I don’t entirely recognize my actions from the blonde woman’s recountal. The facts are essentially right; I did chase the wife across the lawn and shoot her there, and I did intercept the husband in the garage and shoot him there, and I did leave without a trace, without witnesses, without clues in my wake.
But somehow the tone is all wrong, the sense of it, the feeling of it. These words she uses—“brutal” “savage” “cold-hearted”—give completely the wrong impression. They leave out the error that caused it all. They leave out the panic and confusion. They leave out the trembling, the sweating, the icy fear.

By now I'm the narrator. This happens routinely with me when I read first-person stories. I identify with the one telling the story—even if he or she is not likeable. I can't help it. Sort of a reader's Stockholm Syndrome maybe. I can think of only one instance when a first-person narrator, a psychotic serial killer, was so despicable, so repugnant that I could not stay with him. When I could see I was becoming him, I abandoned the book and took a hot shower. No such trouble being Burke Devore. I didn't especially like him, but then I don't especially like myself. I couldn't help empathizing with Devore. Considering his circumstances, it was hard to dismiss his rationale for responding the way he does.
He's been out of work a couple of years. The specialty paper mill where he was a manager merged with a Canadian company and moved his job across the border. His once comfortable life with a loving wife and two teenage kids is coming undone. He isn't the only victim. Corporate downsizing and middle-management layoffs are rife. He gets philosophical periodically to bolster his resolve. And he makes sense. This is happening in 1997. It's gotten steadily worse since then:
Long-term joblessness, it hurts everything. Not just the discarded worker, but everything. Maybe it’s wrong of me, snobbish or something, to think this hits the middle class more than other people, because I’m middle class (and trying to stay middle class), but I do think it does, it hurts us more. The people at the extremes, the poor and the very rich, are used to the idea that life has great swings, now you’re doing well, now you’re doing badly. But the middle class is used to a smooth progress through life. We give up the highs, and in return we’re supposed to be protected from the lows. give our loyalty to a company, and in return they’re supposed to give us a smooth ride through life. And now it isn’t happening, and we feel betrayed.

He illustrates this betrayal with a lesson from Scottish history. Tenant farmers in the Highlands there, who for generations had rented land, living in little stone houses they'd built themselves, were forced to leave when the landowners decided raising sheep would bring in more money than the farmers' rent. Called “the Clearance,” this process started near the end of the 18th century and continued for decades. Devore gives us one of the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions of clearance: The clearing (of land) by the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, etc. "You’ll never see a clearer proof that history is written by the winners," he concludes. "Just think; one comma less, and the inhabitants would have fallen into the etc. It’s the descendants of those landlords that are doing the clearances called downsizing now. The literal descendants, sometimes, and the spiritual descendants always."
 They left, not willingly. Some went to Ireland, some went to North America, some went to hell. Some died of cold or starvation. Some resisted, and were given the chop right there, on their own land. Well, no; not their own land.

 “Some resisted.” Devore decides to follow their example to save his way of life and that of his family. He decides to be a deliverer of “the chop” rather than the choppers' victim. He chooses as his victims not the corporate heads who are doing the modern clearances, but competitors for his one chance to get a “position” similar to one he'd been chopped from. He studies the trade journals until he finds a suitable mill that looks secure enough to avoid the kind of downsizing running rampant in the paper production industry. He decides to “create” a job for him there by killing the man already holding it. Next he creates a letterhead purporting to be a small mill, and takes out ads in the trade journals seeking someone to fill the kind of position he's seeking. He's soon flooded with applicants. He studies their resumĂ©s, winnowing them down to the six who likely would best him competing for the vacancy that will soon open up unexpectedly. Now he sets out to kill his six competitors.
I'm not with him at this point. Not yet. The empathy's not quite there. But Devore slowly wins me over. It helps that he doesn't like what he believes he has to do. He's basically decent. He doesn't celebrate after he's “snuffed out” one of his victims:
I’m weeping when I get back to the motel, still weeping. I feel so weak I can barely steer, hardly press my foot against the accelerator and, at last, the brake.
The Luger is still in my pocket. It weighs me down on the right side, dragging down on me so that I stumble as I move from the Voyager to the door to my room. Then the Luger bangs against my hand, interfering with me, while I try to get into my pants pocket for the key, the key to the room.
At last. I have the key, I get it into the lock, I open the door. All of this is mostly by feel, because I’m sobbing, my eyes are full of tears, everything swims. I push the door open, and the room that was going to be warm and homey is underwater, afloat, cold and wet because of my tears.
No crocodile tears, these. The guy's a wreck, continually arguing with himself about this “project.” And this:
I must have been crazy, out of my mind. How could I have done these things? Herbert Herbert Everly. Edward Ricks, and his poor wife. And now Everett Dynes. He was like me, he should be my friend, my ally, we should work together against our common enemies. We shouldn’t claw each other, down here in the pit, fight each other for scraps, while they laugh up above. Or, even worse; while they don’t even bother to notice us, up above.
But:
The millennium is shaking us up, the way a high-pitched tone shakes up a dog. [...]
And that’s why I woke up in terror, thinking, What am I becoming? What have I become?
I’m not a killer. I’m not a murderer, I never was, I don’t want to be such a thing, soulless and ruthless and empty. That’s not me. What I’m doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders’ logic, and the executives’ logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally by my own logic.
Show me an alternative, and I’ll take it. What I’m doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life. [...]
I’m harboring an armed and dangerous man, a merciless killer, a monster, and he’s inside me.


We're at that point now where you don't want me to stop, I know. You want me to copy the entire novel right here in my blog. Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent. But I'll leave you with this thought, the final paragraph of the Times's gasp-stifling (presumably) D. Keith Mano's review:As novels go, The Ax is pretty much flawless, with a surprise ending that will unplug your expectations. Burke Devore is American Man at the millennium--as emblematic of his time as George F. Babbitt and Holden Caulfield and Capt. John Yossarian were of theirs. Westlake has written a remarkable book.
If you can't relate to it, be thankful.”


[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]




Thursday, April 13, 2017

CURSED TO DEATH – Bill Crider

Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, introduced me to the Zero® candy bar. Until then the Fifth Avenue® bar had been my favorite. It still is. Not that the Zero is a bad bar. It's not, in fact it's pretty good.
It's just not a Fifth Avenue. I've had only two Zeros in my life. I bought the first one at the Dollar General store out of curiosity because Sheriff Rhodes was hooked on them while solving a mysterious homicide in Murder in the Air, the first in the Rhodes series I read, and the 18th in the series.
I had my second bar while reading another Rhodes mystery, the first in the series,
Too Late to Die. I figured it would be fun to chew on my Zero bar as Sheriff Rhodes chewed on his while solving the murder. But Rhodes hadn't discovered the Zero bar yet. He still hadn't discovered it in Cursed to Death, the third in the Rhodes series. 

[Darn it, I hate to break up the narrative flow here but I got to thinking about the Zero bar, and suddenly had to walk down to the Dollar General and get another—my third. I ate it on the way back to the library. It was as good as I remembered, but it still wasn't a Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue, by the way, is becoming a tad hard to find. None in the Dollar General or in the Rite Aid next door. Might be a mystery that needs looking into.] By now you're undoubtedly wondering if I've slipped off the trolley tracks of the standard book review format. Not that my reviews (which I prefer to call “reports” because I do not feel qualified to critique any literary endeavor) ever follow the standard trolley tracks. In fact the only trolleys I remember seeing were what my parents called “streetcars” and they were in Milwaukee when I was a child, and, so far as I know, are long, long gone.
Crider at work
To those of you getting angry or horribly bored now--and I'd be surprised if at least some of you aren't--I humbly submit that my attempt to write like Bill Crider writes his Dan Rhodes mysteries has fallen woefully short. Here's what I mean:
Details. They were always important in any investigation of any crime, and it was funny how often you overlooked them, even the most obvious ones. But it wasn’t as if they were forgotten, or never noticed in the first place. Sometimes the details suddenly jumped into your mind, coming all at once out of whatever dark corner they’d been hiding in, and made everything clear. Maybe things would work out like that in the Martin case, which was still bothering Rhodes. It wasn’t easy to think about murder and a missing man when your mind was on being engaged. Or it could have been the other way around. It wasn’t easy to think about being engaged when your mind was on murder and a missing man.
Rhodes gave it up. He went out back, fed Speedo [his dog], and drove back to the jail.
Did that help? Not yet? How about this:
Rhodes had entertained several thoughts. Kidnapping hadn’t been one of them. “No note,” he said. “No phone calls. At first I thought he’d just gone out on a party, but now I don’t know. It’s pretty certain that he didn’t leave that van there, all wiped down.”
Then we can say that you suspect ‘foul play’?” She pretended to be writing notes on a nonexistent pad.
I don’t say things like that,” Rhodes told her.
I know. It’s part of your charm.”
Rhodes didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t think of himself as having any charm, and he thought maybe Ivy [his betrothed] was kidding him.
Ivy might have been kidding Rhodes, but she was right. His earthbound, uncomplicated common sense is part of his charm—a large part of it, and of Crider's narrative voice in the 24-book Dan Rhodes series (with the 25th due out in August.) I intend to read them all, gulp them down like Cheetos®, but I can't be obvious about it. They must be slipped in surreptitiously (a word Sheriff Rhodes would never use) between the darker, more complex works my literary advisor, Fictionaut's Kitty Boots, assigns periodically. I can do this, but I can't report on them all, not with Ms. Boots keeping an eye on this blog. The inadvertent confrontation might be similar were Ms. Boots, expecting me to be watching a televised production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, to catch me instead sneaking a peek at a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show. Truth be told, Sheriff Rhodes enjoys watching Andy Taylor, Mayberry's widowed sheriff, solve domestic problems and the occasional crime like those Rhodes handles in Blacklin County. Short of murder, that is. It's something Rhodes ponders (altho he would never use that word):
As he watched the episode unfold, Rhodes wondered if anyone had ever disappeared in Mayberry. Or if anyone had ever been murdered. He was sure that Sheriff Taylor could have solved things in less than thirty minutes and then made sure that Barney got credit for the whole thing. Rhodes wished his own case were that easy.
Rhodes's case is indeed perplexing (nor that one—I'm not trying to mimic Crider anymore). A local dentist whose hobby is buying rental properties goes missing after one of his tenants, enraged because he removed the TV from her home for nonpayment of rent, came to his office and put a loud, frightening curse on him in front of his entire office staff. And then, as Rhodes bumbles genially along trying to find out what happened to the dentist, the dentist's wife turns up clubbed to death in their home. Definitely not your customary Mayberry scenario.
Sunday-go-to-meeting Crider
Sheriff Rhodes, unlike my recollection of his TV likeness, gets into some serious scraps. He's neither a macho type nor a big man, like Sheriff Taylor. He just wades in and does his job. Here's Rhodes expecting trouble at the start of a confrontation with a suspect he wants to question: “Swan looked even bigger than he remembered. Rhodes’s pipsqueak neck tingled in anticipation of Swan’s fingers encircling it.” They fought. Rhodes's neck survived.
Rhodes doesn't like to use his sidearm, either, but he uses it, and not to especially good effect. Does he solve the murder? Does he find the missing dentist? Does he manage to keep from screaming at the two wiseass geezers who run his jail and handle the dispatch radio? Of course, to the first and the second, and yes to the third.


[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]




Wednesday, April 5, 2017

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD – Peter Matthiessen

I was in Europe, with the Army, when At Play in the Fields of the Lord came out. In 1965. I paid it no heed. My literary tastes at the time had drifted from academic to more popular influences—Mailer, Baldwin, Ellison, James Jones, Eugene Burdick...—writing I considered edgier or maybe more accessible, or a mix of the two, than the classics seemed to offer. I vaguely remember reading about At Play when it hit the reviews, and I vaguely remember thinking, nah, not for me. And that was that. Never looked back.

Until a couple weeks ago. Once again my literary adviser, Fictionaut.com's Kitty Boots, rescued me from the obscurity of going to my grave without having given a well-worthy novel at least due glance. At her subtle invitation I glanced and glanced some more and soon got yanked into the maw of Peter Matthiessen's masterpiece which I suspect by then already had entered the Valhalla of classic literary works availing precious few alibis to self-respecting literati.
It was perhaps opportune that I had come down with a particularly virulent strain of flu when I started reading At Play. Or maybe not. My fevered nightmares and the drug-drenched interior raves of Lewis Moon were jibing, either accidentally or the book was deliberately leaking psychic chemistry into my blood. I had to lay off awhile until I could be sure which mental state was in charge. Coherence remained obscure in both venues, but in the one, Matthiessen's narrative artistry did promise to get me over the jungle wall and out of immediate danger without a pillow soak. The following might describe the nightmare of either of us, the other being Lewis Moon, half-breed soldier of fortune experiencing the start of a life changing epiphany among a primitive tribe of Indians he was being blackmailed to drive out of their home in the Amazon jungle—with bombs and machineguns if necessary. The catalyst is an Indian concoction with powerful hallucinogenic properties:
The bottle stood upon the sill; he drank it to the bottom.
He felt like crying, but did not. He had not cried in twenty years—no, more. Had he ever cried? And yet he did not really feel like crying; he felt like laughing, but did not. [...]
He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world without, and far away he heard them coming, the marching of huge nameless armies coming toward him, and once again his hands turned cold. He felt very cold. On the wall of the room, over the door, he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing. It palpitated gently; he could hear the palpitations, and the spots were growing. And there was a voice, a hollow voice, very loud, and very far away, calling through glass, and there were hands on him and he was shaken violently. The voice rose and crashed in waves, rolling around his ears; it was getting dark. […]
...colors rich and somber now, and shapes emerging; the shapes flowered, rose in threat and fell away again. Fiends, demons, dancing spiders with fine webs of silver chain. A maniac snarled and slavered, and rain of blood beat down upon his face. Teeth, teeth grinding in taut rage, teeth tearing lean sinew from gnarled bone. Idiocy danced hand in hand with lunacy and hate, rage and revenge; the dungeon clanked and quaked with ominous sounds, and he kept on going, down into the darkness…
I banished my demons eventually with a Z-pak and prednisone. Lewis Moon stole an airplane in the dead of night, flew over the jungle, and parachuted into a village of savages who received him as a god.
Sound familiar? The horror, the horror? I never read much Conrad, either, back in the day. I'm drawn now irresistibly to that master of dark. Because of the magic. The magic that one critic claimed is missing from At Play. In his whiny New York Times review, Eliot Fremont-Smith starts out with such effusive praise one might expect he and Matthiessen wore identical fraternity rings. Then, after presumably allowing a disdainful sniff, he unloads this: “...at every page, one is interested, admiring, agreeing even--but not transported, not engrossed. It's like reading Conrad, but without the magic (I have no other word for it). Because of the book's many obvious qualities and because passion is there, powerful though fixed, one's disappointment at being less than absorbed is keen and eventually overriding.”
Speak for yourself, Fremont-Smith. At Play absorbed the bejeebies out of me. At the same time I'm curious about “the magic” that apparently elevates Conrad to a sublimity only the most cynical, tenured lit. professor might deride. No swoons in this class!
But I cannot agree to such a rigid division, with “magic” on one side and “merely explainable” on the other. Not in the New York Times, anyway, where one expects literary reviews to be, well, literary rather than metaphysical. Unless Fremont-Smith found himself in a deadline hurry and used “magic” as code for “too subtly artistic to try to explain here given my space/time limitations,” or “Conrad gives me acid flashbacks.”
Then again, allowing different toques for different bloques, I can easily say the subtle artistry Matthiessen employs throughout At Play insinuated itself so deeply into my psyche it summoned a long-buried bummer or two from my days of deeeep breaths and tightly constricted exhales. The kind of hypersensitivity that focused on minute nuances—a loaded glint in the eye, lethal tone or emphasis of a distinctive syllable, a word projecting all of its connotations at once with one in particular aimed directly at your deepest insecurity. All but you laughed, secretly, it seemed. You felt the sweat in your armpits. Paranoia, we called it before the California argot took over.
Peter Matthiessen
 Matthiessen endows his characters with this extreme acumen to the extent it lends credence to theories that explain ESP in purely physical terms. Hesitation or movement at the wrong moment, a barely perceptible change in pitch of voice, timing of a facial expression, a bead of sweat can give people away, offer glimpses into character. Here's a scene that illustrates the sudden shift in dynamics between the two mercenaries, Moon and Wolfie, flying over the jungle with a crate of bombs they're intending to drop on the Indians. The longtime friends are tense. They're not agreed over the mission. Wolfie suddenly pulls his knife and draws blood from Moon's throat over a perceived anti-semitic slur (Wolfie's Jewish):
Moon glanced at him quickly; he caught the faint humorous flicker before Wolfie could suppress it. “Not that that’s the only reason,” Wolfie snarled.
Did you see that guy shoot an arrow at the plane?” Moon considered knocking Wolfie’s arm away and throwing the plane into a roll. But though he had little to lose by this maneuver, he had nothing at all to gain; Wolfie would kill him with the first reflex. Then he heard Wolfie’s voice again, and from its tone he knew that he had won.
That’s a reason not to bomb? Are you outa your mind, Moon? You really mean you’d cop out on our only chance because some lunatic of a Indian is nutty enough to shoot an arrow at us?”
And though this was exactly what Moon did mean, he now turned his head and gazed coldly at his partner. He was sorry that he had pleaded, however obliquely, and now that he had gained an edge, the knife point at his chin infuriated him.
I found Moon and Wolfie the most interesting of a small ensemble cast of characters. A close third was Father Xantes, a clever, sardonic Catholic priest competing evangelically with two Baptist missionary couples. Ironies abound. I could almost hear the Kingston Trio plinking and harmonizing throughout with their version of Sheldon Harnack's Merry Minuet: “They're rioting in Africa...and I don't like anybody very much.” The protestants in At Play hate the Catholics, and can't get along with each other. The Indians hate all of the white interlopers, and can't get along with each other.
All of the characters are carefully and realistically drawn. At times I wanted to slap one or another of the Baptists, and I kept thinking of Claude Rains playing Father Xantes in the movie, reprising his role of Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca. Probably some sort of chemical flashback.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]