The Library Book, by Susan Orleans

One way to describe Susan Orleans' The Library Book (2018) is obsession.  Another is free association.  The catalyst for the book is the fire that destroyed much of the Los Angeles Library in 1987, burning or damaging some 900,000 books.  Obsession or free association, this fascinating book touches on or explores the place of libraries in society, especially American society, their history, their nature.  It examines the lives of the directors of the library, one of whom in particular, Henry Lummus, is a fascinating if not bizarre American figure.  Other topics are arson, the role of women in libraries, criminal investigations, street people.  Orleans weaves in aspects of her own life, especially her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and who died midway through the book’s writing.  Libraries are a cultural memory.  They preserve the record of a culture when memories disappear because of disease or death. For this reason, Orleans associates the burning of a library as a heinous act which destroy those memories.  She notes how dictators have used the destruction of libraries as a method of oppression.  She cites the Nazis, who destroyed as many books of Jewish culture, religion, and history as possible in its campaign to eradicate Judaism.  She also focuses on the character Harry Peake, briefly arrested as a suspect in the library fire.  She examines his life in some detail and the argument for and against his having started the fire.  She cannot decide herself.  She notes that the science behind arson is suspect, and that arson is often a cause resorted to by investigators who can’t find any other explanation for a fire.  (She notes that shaken baby syndrome has been used in a similar way).

Margaret Louise Caruthers Ruppersburg

Margaret Louise Caruthers Ruppersburg died on February 22, 2019, at the age of 91. Most recently she resided at St. Anne’s Terrace, Atlanta, where she had lived for nine years.  For much of her life she lived in College Park, Georgia, where she raised her six children: Hugh Michael Ruppersburg of Athens (Tricia), Margaret Anne Watkins (Joe) of Sandy Springs, Karen Lynn Keenum (Ty) of Sandy Springs, Nan Renee Hudson (Tom) of Black Mountain, NC, Luke Caruthers Ruppersburg of Sugar Hill, and Elizabeth Finley King (Bill) of Elkins, WV. She had fifteen grandchildren: Bill Watkins, Michael Ruppersburg (Sarah), Emily Hudson (Bryan Quintana), Chris Keenum (Ann), Claire Watkins (Adam Dwyer), Margaret Hudson, Charles Ruppersburg (Chelsey), Patrick Keenum (Caroline), Andy Watkins (Amanda), Camille Hudson (Bryan Simmons), Max Ruppersburg, Elizabeth King, Luke Ruppersburg, Jr., Walter King, and Julia Ruppersburg.  She had seven great grandchildren. During her last days, she called her children and grandchildren “my crowning glory.”

Margaret was born on July 2, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas.  She was the only child of Luther Lawrence Caruthers (a crop duster and later a pilot for Delta Airlines) and Gussie Maxwell Caruthers (a schoolteacher and mother). As the daughter of a pilot who dusted crops across the southeast, Margaret moved often during her childhood.  She remembered attending thirteen different schools in one year. In 1939, her family settled in College Park, Georgia.  At the age of 12 she attended the premier of Gone with the Wind and wrote a short article about it for a local newspaper. She played the accordion and once a week rode the bus from College Park to Atlanta to play with a large accordion choir for young women.

During World War II Margaret volunteered for the Red Cross. She attended Richardson High School and then College Park High School, where she graduated first in her class in 1944. She went on to study journalism at the University of Georgia, graduating in 1948.  At UGA she belonged to Pi Phi sorority and served a year as president. She was inducted into Mortar Board, Pi Kappa Phi, and Alpha Lambda Delta honor societies and was a staff member for the college yearbook, newspaper, and magazine. After graduation she worked several years for Davison’s department store in Atlanta and edited the company newspaper.  The Magnolia Tea Room at Rich’s was one of her favorite places.

In 1949 Margaret married Hugh Ruppersburg of College Park.  Her good friend Lucille, Hugh’s sister, had introduced them.  Children began arriving in 1950.  The marriage ended in 1976.  Margaret raised her six children on a tight budget, but she made sure they could pursue their interests.  She saw that they had music lessons, played sports, took ballet lessons.  She took them to the local library often and encouraged their reading. She attended any event in which they had a part.  She welcomed their friends into the house and gave them a place to sleep if they needed it.  She befriended neighborhood children. She was president of the PTA and often a room mother. She was good at tolerating, overlooking, and forgiving the various foibles of her offspring. She especially stressed education: all of her children graduated from college. Long after they had grown up and left home, she continued supporting and encouraging them. Later in their lives, they did their best to thank her. 

Margaret had a warm sense of humor and was a model of courtesy and grace.  She loved playing bridge with her friends. She enjoyed reading, socializing, baking, and following the news. She was a lifelong Democrat but generally kept her politics to herself, except among her children. For most of her adult life she attended First Methodist Church of College Park, where she taught Sunday School and kept the nursery. For several years she was a substitute teacher at Woodward Academy, where she also volunteered her time.  After her father’s death in 1967, she managed his four greenhouses and grew orchids which she sold to local florists. She kept books for her husband’s business and then for her son Luke when he took it over. She sewed clothes, knitted sweaters and stockings, and smocked dresses for her grandchildren.  She was a serious fan of crossword puzzles and Jeopardy.

Each summer for more than 40 years, Margaret’s children and grandchildren vacationed with her for a week on the Florida Coast, first at Destin Beach and then on St. George Island.  She enjoyed the fun and uproar of these gatherings.  She loved sitting on the beach, sipping a glass of Chardonnay.

Margaret was the heart of a family that loved her dearly and cannot begin to imagine her absence.

The Green Book

The controversy surrounding The Green Book (2018; dir. Peter Farrelly) mainly centers on how the film enacts a pattern often seen in films and fiction about race in the United States.  The typical scenario in these films concerns a black character (usually a man) who works for or with a white character (of either gender).  The white character is usually a person with more power and wealth than the black character. At first both characters are suspicious of each other, but over a period of time, they become friendly, and their friendship helps the white character escape his racism or solve other problems.  Sometimes such narratives are termed black redemption or black messiah narratives.  Examples include Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Defiant Ones (1958), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Secret Life of Bees (2008).  The Green Book has frequently been compared to Driving Miss Daisy, in which an elderly racist Southern woman gradually becomes friends with the black man whom her son has hired as her driver. In the final scene of the film, Daisy, senile and living in an extended care facility, tells Hoke that he is “my best friend.” (The scene uncomfortably anticipates an extended scene in Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls (1997) in which a feeble and elderly George Wallace describes his affection for the black man who has been hired as his caregiver.) These black redemption narratives are supposed to make white viewers feel better about their racist past.  Critics argue that they don’t reflect the reality of racism in America and that they tend to focus on the white characters rather than the black ones.

The Green Book reflects this pattern.  But there are also significant differences.  The driver is a white working-class New Yorker (Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortensen) and the man whom he is hired to work for (both as driver and body guard) is an accomplished black classical pianist, Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali).  Shirley is the person in power.  He looks down on Tony as uneducated and crude.  Tony, in turn, doesn’t know much about black people and is as a result a casual racist.  In the film, the pianist helps his driver learn about black men as human beings, introduces him to racism in the South, and helps him appreciate classical music and friendship.  In turn, the driver helps introduce the pianist to black culture in terms of soul food and the blues (why a New York Italian would know much about the blues and soul food isn’t explained). The scene in which he changes his mind and visit’s Tony’s apartment, where he is welcomed by family and friends, seals the deal between these two different men.  It is also one of the most questionable scenes in the film. This scene is certainly possible, but it’s difficult to imagine that it would happen.

There’s another issue.  Neither Tony nor Shirley is characteristic of the group he represents.  Tony has little knowledge of African Americans.  His racism is evident but not especially strong.  He’s an Italian New Yorker: not a Southerner. Shirley is a talented, highly accomplished pianist—wealthy and privileged. Although he lives in a racist time, his money and talents insulate him from a lot of it (though not all).  He’s also gay, and he suffers for that when he is caught in a public restroom with another man.  (Tony convinces the police not to arrest him, explaining to Shirley that he’s seen a lot in the bars he’s worked, and he doesn’t seem especially surprised or shocked). My point: both characters are more complicated that it might first seem, and they fit as a result uneasily into the identities many critics assign them.

Despite these shortcomings, especially the simplistic reflection of race relations in America, the film offers an entertaining and warm comedy about friendship. It gives a broad view of racism in the American south during the late 1950s. It doesn’t advance the examination of race and racism in American films.

The acting by Mortensen and Ali is excellent. Mortensen was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his role, while Ali was nominated for Best Supporting actor (he won).  Their roles are of equal importance in the film, and they share relatively equal screen time.  Why wasn’t Ali nominated for Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor?

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

Maurice Bendrix is one of the angriest narrators I’ve encountered. He’s angry at his dead lover, Sarah Miles, for abandoning him.  He’s angry at her husband for his passive acceptance of their infidelity, even for taking him into his home as a flat mate after her death.  His anger renders all his judgments suspect.  In the end, he finds that he has misjudged and misunderstood Sarah.  He misrepresents her religious inclinations to the priest who wants to give her a Catholic burial.  As an agnostic, even an atheist, he resists to the end acknowledging that she had become a believer seeking to connect or reconnect with the Catholic church.

Despite his anger and his meanness, Bendrix is a powerful narrator.

The End of the Affair (1961) is a religious novel masquerading as a story about an adulterous affair.  For its time, it’s fairly graphic about the details.  The novel takes place during the Second World War.  While Sarah is with Bendrix in his flat, a V-1 bomb strikes the house.  She finds him under a fallen door and assumes he is dead.  She prays to God, whom she half believes in, to let him live.  The next moment he appears, covered with dust and alive. In her prayer she promised God that if he allows Bendrix to live, she would leave him because it would mean that God is real and that their affair is a sin.  She abides by her promise and returns to her husband.

The crisis of faith is first of all Sarah’s. Her lover’s survival of the bombing brings her to believe. But it is also that of Bendrix, who can’t accept Sarah’s conversion and who resists to the end acknowledging it or its possible meaning for him.  He becomes all the angrier when he reads her journal and discovers why she left him and that she still loved him. He is angriest of all, ironically, at the God in whom he doesn’t believe.

The End of the Affair was an intense, powerful novel.  Bendrix himself is a novelist.  A little research revealed that Greene drew for this novel from an affair he had with the woman to whom it is dedicated. He significantly changed some details.

My previous encounters with Greene were with The Power and the Glory (1940), which I barely remember, and The Comedians (1966), which did not impress me, though I read it at an age when I could hardly have appreciated it.  The End of the Affair convinces me to reread The Power and the Glory again and to read other novels by Greene. 

The Dry, by Jane Harper

Like many murder mysteries, The Dry by Jane Harper (2017) begins with a murder—a brutal triple murder:  a farmer, his wife, and their teenaged son. Adam, a former friend of of the farmer, returns to town for the funeral. Everyone in town believes that the farmer, Luke, killed his wife and son.  Certain details don’t make sense, both to the local police officer and to Adam, who is a financial detective back in Melbourne.  He stays in town for a few extra days to help with the investigation and gradually finds himself deeply drawn into solving the mystery of the murders.

Almost everyone in the novel has a back story.  Some of them are relevant.  Others are not.  A sub-plot that parallels the present-time plot involves Adam’s 16-year old girlfriend who drowned 20 years before the present time.  As her boyfriend, and because a note with his name on it found when her body was recovered, everyone thinks Adam killed her.  He and his father left town as a result. Now that he is back in town, the old suspicions return.  He encounters considerable hostility.

The novel is told in the present time with flashbacks to the past.  Possible leads turn out to be false. A character who seems to have been wholly uninvolved in the murder emerges in the last few chapters as the murderer.

The main interest in The Dry is the small town in which it takes place—a town in the isolated Australian outback, suffering a prolonged drought, in danger of fire.  A town bully and his friends intimidate everyone in town. They attack Adam on several occasions. The novel is well done but conventional.  It does its job as a murder mystery.