Books: Summer Mysteries & Fernanda Eberstadt's Lives of the Outsider Saints
Two seperate Forbes,com book review articles in one post!
Summer Mysteries: Three Novels That Make For A Mini-Vacation
As we head towards Labor Day, I savor a good story well told, that I can read in a day or two, and that I might read even faster because I just can’t stop. And if it features a damaged detective in a far-off locale, impelled to solve a case others want to close a little too fast, it’s like going on a mini-vacation. Here are some mysteries I’ve enjoyed recently:
Clete by James Lee Burke (Atlantic Monthly Press)
I could tell you that James Lee Burke is the greatest mystery writer or detective novelist in America, but that would not be exact. Now, if I dropped the words “mystery” and “detective” from that lede, that would give you a fairer portrait of how good Burke is.
I could tell you that he’s been nominated for a Pultizer, won several Edgar awards and is a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America.
But it’s all about the writing. Burke writes like a poet in a fever dream.
Burke is best known for his series about Dave Robicheaux, a Cajun detective who served in Vietnam, was a detective in New Orleans, then moved out to New Iberia where he has a place on the Teche Bayou, and where he is occasionally beset by hallucinations of Confederate soldiers marching through the mist, some of whom may be his ancestors.
Burke tells a gripping story, he’s good on the mystery, good on the police procedural, good on the quirky side characters, good on the colorful villains and the occasional homicidal maniacs. But where he shines is not just in creating a world that feels like home even if you’ve never been East of Vegas, West of Connecticut or South of St. Louis. His stories are infused with a deeper level of artistry, imagination, and at times of hallucination in ways that are hard to forget, even after you finish one novel and start the next.
There are something like 24 Robicheaux novels. That may seem like a lot, and it is. But here’s the thing. Over his last half-century as a novelist, there have been stretches where Robicheaux went so quiet that you wondered if he was done. Then in 2018, Burke brought the series back to life with Robicheaux, a novel that both restarts and continues the story — and since then he’s been on a tear. It’s hard to think of another writer, perhaps other than Philip Roth, who has had such an incredible late career second wind. Burke, now in his 80s is writing better than ever.
Clete, the latest installment, puts center stage Robicheaux’s longtime sidekick, Clete Purcel. A man of principle who has crossed every line there is to cross, and often suffered the consequences, he is always there for Robicheaux, as Robicheaux is for him. Trouble has a way of finding him, and he has a way of finding his way through to a just conclusion.
Sometimes I wonder what I would say to Burke if I got a chance to interview him. One thing I know for sure, I would just say: Thank you.
The Trespasser by Tana French (Penguin Books)
Tana French is an American-Irish writer whose novels, often set in Dublin and involving detectives investigating a murder, feel like literary works. There is an intensity to her novels that stays with you. Often told from the point of view of her narrators, detectives damaged in one way or another by their past. As the novel progresses, her lead detectives are often found to be unreliable or mistaken about the most basic facts of the crime they are trying to solve. Yet, just when all seems lost, they nonetheless muddle through to a resolution that is rarely neat or satisfying to the protagonist.
The Trespasser is novel six in the Dublin Murder Squad series. It involves a young woman found dead in her own home, and a search for the killer with more red herrings than types of smoked fish at Russ & Daughters. Police officers who don’t trust each other, officers covering for each other, suspects who lie, and so many agendas and scores being settled that it is amazing they do, eventually, solve the crime. What French is so good at is her ability to root the characters and the crimes in human frailty that we can all understand. And that is no small achievement.
The Kill Artist by Daniel Silva (Berkley Books).
Rabbis Susan Nanus, my friend and pandemic co-YouTube culture critic, loves mysteries and one of her favorite authors is Daniel Silva. She has read every one of Silva’s Gabriel Allon mystery series, and when a new one comes out – it’s like a holiday for her.
I had never read one of them. So, in this summer of mysteries, I decided to start at the beginning and read the first in the series, The Kill Artist. It was fun. It was a quick read, and it made the time fly by.
Gabriel Allon is an art restorer. He is also an Israeli assassin in league with Israel’s security service. The Kill Service, published in 2004, is about stopping a Palestinian terrorist planning a major assassination of a political figure, and who as part of his plan, is also hoping to kill Allon, his nemesis. The plot features a combination of real world characters such as Yasser Arafat (whom Silva portrays in a flattering manner that often has the ring of truth), as well characters easily identified as stand-ins for Israeli politicians and intelligence leaders, as well as a character clearly based on the late English Media Baron Robert Maxwell. It’s a game of cat and mouse, a chess game, where the reader is always playing catch up.
So, find your patch of heaven, and enjoy the mysteries of summer.
Fernanda Eberstadt Celebrates The Lives Of Outsider Saints
Fernanda Eberstadt’s new non-fiction book, Bite Your Friends, Stories of the Body Militant is an unconventional memoir, if that is the right word for a book whose narrative focuses on figures she never knew yet who loom large as her heroes, such as Diogenes, the Ancient Greek philosopher, Christian martyrs Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicitas, French philosopher Michel Foucault, Italian author and filmmaker Pier Pasolini and Russian political artists such as Piotr Pavlensky and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot. Not all of whom turn out to be saints.
Bite Your Friends is really a manifesto, a declaration of affinity for a certain aesthetic belonging to those outsiders who push back at normative society, even normative sexual identity. Eberstadt’s particular lens is, as her title states, the body militant: How these individuals’ own bodies became part of their artistic, spiritual and political practice. It is also about Eberstadt’s own reckoning in middle age, to rouse herself from complacency and to recommit to the life of the outsider.
The book’s cast of characters (and they are all characters) include the Greek philosopher Diogenes in all his filthy wildness; her mother Isabel, whose early death from kidney failure was a side effect of a mis-prescribed drug; artists Stephen Vrable, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, as well as Foucault, who all died of complications from AIDs; Pasolini, murdered in Rome’s backstreets; Pavlensky mutilating himself, and battering his wife; and Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot’s defiant performance in a Russian Orthodox Church. Eberstadt’s writing about these thinkers and artists is filled with empathy and written with a variety of strategies to bring us into their worlds – to see them anew with different eyes.
Eberstadt has made a life of taking the less expected path. Her father, Frederick, the son of a financier active in The New Deal, was a photographer who became a therapist late in life. Her mother, Isabel, was the daughter of the poet Ogden Nash, and was herself a novelist, journalist, socialite, and a star in Andy Warhol’s firmament.
As for Eberstadt, we learn that as a young girl at an elite private girls school in New York City, her best friend, met on the street in New York, was Stephen Varble, a transvestite performance artist almost twice her age. As a teenager, she circulated among the city’s demi-monde, not so much Alice though the looking glass as Heloise at the Mudd Club doing drugs. She feels betrayed when her breasts appear, changing how men look at her, and how they act towards her.
If not wise beyond her years, she is preternaturally intelligent (although she never says so, it is obvious). Rather than the Ivy League, she attends Oxford, then returns to New York where she plunges into the highest rungs of then neocon society, studies to convert to Orthodox Judaism, while writing several well-received novels and magazine pieces for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books among others.
I knew her then and liked her a lot. She had a fresh intelligence that could mix high and low, the sacred and the profane, what was right and what was left, with great charm.
She then escaped to Europe, and married an Englishman, with whom she raised their two children. They lived in a remote part of France where she befriended the local Roma and wrote a brilliant non-fiction work about a family of Roma musicians. More novels (five in all) and a collection of essays followed as well as a steady series of articles, profiles, essays. She then lived in London and remains rooted in Europe.
Ebserstadt has lived a self-invented life, a life of the mind and of words, a life of observing and reporting about others. Is this why she so admires those who put their bodies on the line, literally and figuratively? And now, at a moment when her children are adult, and she is just a decade younger than the age at which her mother died, she wants us to know who she is and what she admires. She describes herself in the continuum of her mother and those she profiles in the book as:
Í’ve fallen into the-lady of leisure routine that nearly killed my mother, that stopped my mother writing, that her into her blackest self-loathing, except that the version I’ve fallen into is a duller version – no Truman Capote masked balls, no Jack Smith transvestite orgies on the beach —_I don’t know how to face the world I’m not a boy a writer a mother a gladiator a Christian pagan Jew a Lower East Side drag queen in ostrich feathers chased by White gangs with broken bottles if I’m not a hermaphrodite with a heart of fire philosopher in skin tight white bell-bottoms looking out at Death Valley acid tears streaming down his cheeks saying: This is my limit-experience; this is my happy day.”
At a time when the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius crowd the bestseller lists, Eberstadt proposes a different ancient philosopher as her Virgil: Diogenes.
Diogenes, often called “the Cynic,” was the enfant terrible of the ancient world, disdaining societal norms, wealth, influence. His followers delighted in committing shameful acts in public. They were the anarchists, the sexual outlaws of their time. Diogenes is the patron saint of outsiders. He is the wild Id that Eberstadt celebrates.
Diogenes, to Eberstadt, is the teller of truth. She writes that she imagines “a female Diogenes come to ridicule and disrupt a society of cosmetic perfection, artificial youthfulness, erasure.”
In narrating Pasolini’s life, and how he accommodated his seemingly bourgeois status with his railing against capitalism, Eberstadt explains: “Pasolini’s answer to his fellow writers is, “Where are you hiding? Writers have a duty to go out in into the world and tell the truth of what they see. I’m the same as you, he says: I have a pleasant bourgeois life, surrounded by books and movies and clever like-minded friends. But because of his compulsions, he’s “Dr. Hyde”: he has this other life that takes him down into hell every night, and he can see the disaster that’s coming for them all.”
In considering how Foucault, Pasolini, as well as Saint Perpetua and Saint Felicitas’ bodies became sources of protest, resistance, courage and damnation, Eberstadt writes: “I think about the scarred body and the scarred soul in a different way now. I’ve been learning from my mad-dog heroes…. Together they form a prophetic fellowship of sisters and brothers saying, ‘If we can do this, you can do it too.”
The Clash asked: Should I stay or should I go? In Bite Your Friends, Eberstadt is mustering the call to know when “to transform a stigma into triumph” and “When it’s okay to sit and watch and when it’s time to get in the ring.”
Despite all this, probably because of all this, Bite Your Friends, is a work where Eberstadt attempts to truly see her mother, and catch her own reflection in her.
This paragraph by her mother, quoted in the book, could just as easily have been written by Eberstadt herself about one of her idols:
I had been close friends with Jack for two years at that time, and our relationship had gone through many stages, all intense. When I first saw Flaming Creatures, I felt I had found the person I had been looking for all my life. I had always been drawn to people who were intelligent misfits, breakers of rules, and disrupters of what I felt was a depressingly conventional social order. Most of these people I loved were very unhappy, despite their bravado. My deepest desire was to help them express their most outrageous fantasies and understand that they could be admired and loved just as they were. When I saw Jack’s bunch of grotesques and how he made them shine, I thought he could change the world.
From my own late age vantage point, I have observed that many of us spend the first halves of our lives doing everything we can to be as different as we can from our parents. And then at a certain point in middle age, the realization hits us: We are our parents. The effect of this is, as Eberstadt grapples with bridging the gap between her and her mother, is not resignation but rather empowerment by knowing who she is and what she believes in.
In Bite Your Friends, Eberstadt makes the case that those explorations of the extreme by outsiders are a necessary corrective to society and humanity, dragging all of us to a more vital existence.
Although in many ways her pedigree and accomplishments would make of her an insider, Eberstadt never wants to feel too comfortable – she wants, she needs it seems, to be an outsider. It is where she feels most at home.