Loving Hands At Home by Diane Johnson

Being the perfect wife is stressful.

Karen Fry is a young wife and mother in Brentwood during the 1960’s. But it is clear, especially to herself, that Karen falls woefully short of the high homemaking standards expected by her Latter Day Saints in-laws. Partly to get away from their opprobrium, she takes her two small children on afternoon trips around LA, applying for wacky jobs, such as receptionist in a cat hotel and fortune teller on Santa Monica Pier. Little by little, however, she learns her conventional in-laws, especially the wives, have some strong internal pressures needing release. Also, she and her brother-in-law begin a strange affair.

Reading this makes me very glad I wasn’t a wife in the 60s. It doesn’t sound like that great a time for women. Or at least for women’s self expression. I wanted to read an early Diane Johnson novel, mostly for historical reasons, but then after I had finished the first chapter I thought, Another wonderful Diane Johnson book. The scenes are “zany," satirical and full of high energy.  Also, there is a classic Johnson BIG scene at the end which ends up with Karen and the kids moving to live in a mail truck at the beach. The final image is that of an “extraordinary, inspired sand castle” she and the children have built.

Lulu In Marrakech by Diane Johnson

A naïve young CIA agent tries to make sense of Marrakech, and by extension, the Islamic world

Something went terribly awry in this novel. In Diane Johnson's other beautifully written books, her trademarks have always been tight classical plotting, a ditzy American heroine, trenchant social observations and a submerged outrage at individual and societal obtuseness. In many of her novels, as well, there is an underlying fascination or fear of the Other. But something went wrong in the execution of Lulu in Marrakech. The plotting is clumpy, with clues piling up suddenly, the ditziness of the heroine falls below a reasonableness standard as no government agency would ever employ her, especially as a spy, and finally her cover story of a love affair that actually is a love affair creates too little conflict. Finally, the fascination with the Other, in this case, Muslims, crosses the line into offensiveness.

Lulu Sawyer, the assumed name of the young California CIA agent, travels to Marrakech, to resume her relationship with Brit Ian Drumm. She lives with him in his compound and gathers information on terrorist funding. She also spies on Ian, but seems to be genuinely in love with the man. The weeks pass and Lulu learns more about the expatriate community.  She also works to help a French girl, Suma, who is in danger of being killed by her brother for the dishonorable crime of losing her virginity. In addition, Ian's neighbors, the good looking Saudis, Gazi and Khaled, are much closer to Ian than Lulu originally assumed. These plot elements gather together, but not in a climatic fashion.

In short order, Lulu stops a suicide bomber, and assists in a CIA rendition. The tone, as is typical in a Diane Johnson novel, is zany, but a huge problem is that a 14 year old suicide bomber is not zany and a man choking to death on his own vomit is not zany. The tone is too muddled. I think we as readers are too close to 9/11.

Here's what I liked. It was consistently absorbing, and I learned a little about Moroccan culture.

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Lying Low by Diane Johnson

You can’t hide forever.

A lightly fictionalized Davis, California in the early 70’s is the setting for this wonderful novel, with its colorful food coops, Photophobia “chicks” and bomb making anarchists. The story is about four scarred (and scared) people living in an old Victorian, hiding out from full participation in life, in some cases because of a quite legitimate fear. Theo and Anton, brother and sister, own the historical home. Theo is a retired ballet dancer, bossy and frightened. They have two boarders, two young women; the secretive leaving no fingerprints Lynn, distracted by lust, and the immigrant fiercely optimistic Ouida, who is determined to participate fully in America. There are mysteries from the past and dangerous secrets to be confronted.

I loved the way the fully realized characters intermeshed and the way the sentences were thoughtful and beautifully written. The satirical plotting went down easily and inevitably. One of Diane Johnson’s trademarks, (or narrative weaknesses perhaps) is the gigantic set piece to close the novel, which sometimes clanks too loudly with a farcical heavy handedness. This novel definitely contains a set piece at the end, though this time it felt more realistic, sadder. This novel ended on a note of sharp melancholy. But optimistic. Yes.

The three primary female characters are completely developed and motivated—the men, not so much. They are a little bit like one note plot points.  Overall, the book is a commentary on America, and on not wasting your life because of fear.

L'Affaire by Diane Johnson

A rich young American woman goes to Europe to acquire some culture.

You would think that in the third of Diane Johnson’s Franco American misunderstanding novels, (all with related sounding titles), the plot or the settings or the characters would start to feel hackneyed or cranked out. But L’Affaire felt fully realized, standing on its own with insights about sudden dot com millionaires, death by avalanche and an exploration of the legal and the emotional side of inheritances. Luckily L’Affaire drops the frenetic plotting of Le Mariage, Johnson's previous book, and proceeds at a statelier pace. The story therefore felt more concentrated and moving.

The plot is presented as frivolous though it’s not frivolous at all. This time we stay pretty much fixed in the mind of Amy Ellen Hawkins, a dot com executive from Palo Alto, California. After collecting her millions, she intends to widen her horizons, get some polish, and learn about things she is deciding could possibly be important. But before she begins her serious education in Paris, she takes time out to ski at a French resort. 

Amy approaches situations in a characteristically American way. She’s nice, she wants to help, she blunders. When a fourteen year old American boy at the ski resort is effectively abandoned after his sister and her elderly husband are injured, Amy gets involved, motivated by the theories of Prince Kropotkin and his Mutual Aid book. She tries to put them into practice. (This trait reminded me of Dorothea in Middlemarch.)

The second plot concerns the victims of the avalanche and the heirs of the husband, a British very rich publishing cad.  He has four children, two legitimate English, one illegitimate French and a legitimate American toddler. He lies in a coma and the geographic location of his death will make a huge impact on the fortunes of his children.  So what is the proper thing to do?  Humorous cross cultural misunderstandings abound.

Diane Johnson’s novels are ostensibly comic, but horrible things happen to the characters, horrible things with no solace. It’s the case here as well. In addition, it’s beautifully written. Among other things, it’s a meditation and an observation on anti Americanism, and, as always, sexual attraction between a man and a woman.

Le Mariage by Diane Johnson

An American groom and Parisian bride encounter distractions on the way to the altar

It was relaxing to return to the hands of a master – the telling of a story, the juggling of many characters who are the cogs of a farcically complex plot, the painting of a moral picture. It’s all very skillfully done. I love Diane Johnson's sentences. The best have an elegantly flowing preface ending with a common or almost vulgar thump. For example, “Tim always spoke with great affection of his mother, inadvertently giving the impression she was dead, though she lived in Michigan.”

The story begins by introducing the three main characters - Clara Holly, the beautiful young retired actress, Tim Nolinger, the classic somewhat dopey good American, and Anne-Sophie, the cute whimsical Parisian who owns an antique stall specializing in equestrian themes. The three of them undergo many comic misunderstandings, Franco-American and otherwise, on the way to Tim and Anne-Sophie’s wedding. There’s a murder, a forgery, a doomed love affair, American wackos, obscene French novelists, paranoid Polish movie directors, limping girls and growling attack dogs. However, eventually I thought there may have been one too many things going on. Sometimes the brass machinery of the plot was visible clicking away beneath the too thin skin.

I’m not sure if you need all the Oregonians (however humorous those hicks may have been) as well as the hasty trip to Oregon three days before the wedding. I was never quite sure what was going on with the Oregon cultists. Were they supposed to be like the Branch Davidians?

Diane Johnson writes comedy though with a ribbon of tragedy. I felt this time the tragedy never cut to the bone the way it usually does. The story felt a little frenetic.

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson

A California and a French family clash when the children go through a divorce

The theme and the overarching plot of this novel is practically the same as "Persian Nights"; the clueless Americans parachuted into a polite bemused foreign culture, though Paris is not in such a state of crisis as pre revolutionary Tehran. I would say this book is expertly plotted, as a fast moving farce. The concluding set piece takes place, this time not at Persepolis but Euro Disney. That climax is followed quickly by a genuine tragedy.

I was a little timid about reading this, because I had so much loved Diane Johnson’s earlier black comedies and this is her most famous book, so I thought it might be sitcommy or sentimental, but no, the satire remains razor sharp, but communicated by a youthful exuberant compelling yet still ditzy first person narrator. I enjoyed reading her voice very much.

Isabel Walker, wealthy young Santa Barbaran, comes to Paris to help her older sister Roxeanne with child care. Only Roxeanne has a secret- her French husband has abandoned her. Reluctantly Roxeanne agrees to a divorce, French style. But there’s that matter of a two million dollar family painting she has gifted her faithless husband. The rest of the American family comes to Paris to investigate. In the meantime, Isabel, whose name echoes that of Isabel Archer, another expatriate dealing with unbreakable European traditions, grows very fond of Paris, its food, its fashion and its 70 year old politicians.

The energy and the comedy come from the culture clash between the two families. Many of the sentences were full of a love of language and a love of life. The plot elements, the Hermes bag, the painting of St Ursula, the glazed bowls, were inserted discreetly. Also, I really admired the way the dinner scenes with several characters were perfectly clear. And even though the story was nominally first person, there were plenty of glimpses into other characters’ heads, in other parts of the world.

I thought it was delightful.

Health and Happiness by Diane Johnson

Doctors are only human


A hospital is its own little world, filled with greed or lust or petty malice. At the same time, hospitals and Western medicine are pinnacles of our civilization because they halt death and restore patients to life.   Sort of like Jesus.  A hospital can also kill patients, which is one of the subplots in this novel. Once again, as I read my way through her collected fiction, I was very impressed by Diane Johnson's world creation skills.

The story begins a little stiffly, then I was immediately sucked in. The major characters are Philip Watts, senior professor of medicine, an excellent thoughtful doctor, though also something of a goody two shoes martinet; Ivy Tarro, a slightly dippy flower child who comes to the hospital with a minor ailment and is almost killed; and Mimi Franklin, the slightly pitiful divorcee who is head of Volunteers.

This book is as elaborately plotted and as filled with characters as a tv show’s bible - - and yet this is not cliché genre fiction – real things are happening inside the walls of this building. I think Diane Johnson’s approach is to use a comic vision to observe many things, including tragedies, such as the gifted young man with sickle cell anemia, the thoughtful old lady who is being kept alive by artificial measures, the brain dead meathead who overdosed on cocaine. Much of the book is not politically correct, but it’s inherently interesting. A glimpse into a San Francisco hospital is a look at the cultural mish mash that is America.

I learned something about modern medicine and something about plotting, the way the minor characters are used as plot points. Also there’s sort of a quiet political commentary on the high cost of health care, the inability of seemingly rational people to pull the plug on a near death loved one, and the hardly suppressed materialism of most doctors.  Excellent writing.

Persian Nights by Diane Johnson

An American ditz contemplates frivolous romances on the eve of the Iranian revolution

Why is not Diane Johnson acclaimed as one of our finest American novelists? Persian Nights is a skillful display of craft, containing numerous interesting characters, a concrete evocation of time and place, a complex plot and an engine powered by a deep down revulsion for American hypocrisy. Also, the novel is a good background primer on the modern politics of Iran. Finally, it’s very funny. Maybe I’m getting overexcited as I’ve only read three Diane Johnson novels. Friends have assured me she has in fact written some bad ones. But the three I’ve read have been very good.

Persian Nights is about Chloe Fowler, an American doctor’s wife who gets sent to Iran for a few months accidentally without her husband. The good news for Chloe is that her lover will be there. The bad news is that the repressive Iranian government is on the verge of being overthrown.  The Americans who prop up the hated Shah and the wealthy Iranians who host the Americans are in real danger of physical harm.

Iran is presented as a gracious cruel misogynistic society. Bad things happen in the middle of the night and it’s quite rude to bring it up the next day. The Americans, all associated with the hospital in Shiraz, are presented as well meaning oafs, appalled by the ignorance and the poverty, but their top priorities seem to be love affairs, drunkeness and caviar.

The structure is farce, especially the big scene at Persepolis. Are there deep feelings here? Yes, but glancingly and in the background. Horrible things happen – innocents and not so innocents die and their deaths seemingly make no dent in Chloe’s pretty little head. Near the end, the threads of the plot tie up a little too head spinningly, but they do in fact tie up, with a few surprises.

The Shadow Knows by Diane Johnson

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?

Although never voiced, this question underlies the events in the novel. I really liked this well written unsentimental book – it worked on many levels. About a ditzy young woman, N., divorced and knocked up with four kids, living in a Sacramento housing project and succumbing to paranoia. Or is she? Perhaps every one she knows is in fact out to kill her. That certainly seems to be in the case in the first person narrative. Among other things, The Shadow Knows is also a nanny novel. N. has a black nanny, Ev, with a similar set of problems: a useless husband and a hurtful lover. Someone is out to get both women. The “murderer” starts small, leaving crap on the windshield, a dead cat on the step, slashed tires. Then the murderer gets personal with deadly results. The powers that be – men really, want N. to forget about the issues, ignore the mounting signals. The one saintly helper turns out not to be so saintly after all.

The amazing thing about this book were the fully developed characters from three distinct worlds – the upper class white world N. has rejected/been exiled from, the black world of drunkenness, manual labor, and music, and N's academic life as a college student/mother. The book is full of incredibly politically incorrect dialogue and scenes. But these scenes did not feel fake or phony. At the end N., a “little bitty woman,” is compelled to become a detective, discovering a midnight core of pure savage sexuality. The final scene is N. receiving the “coup de grace.” The mercy blow typically resulting in death, but in this case it brings happiness.

Burning by Diane Johnson

A seemingly sane couple is unbalanced by their swinging neighbors the day before Bel Air burns down.

I laughed aloud several times while reading this novel, which felt very much like a relic of the Sixties. It’s about Bingo and her doctor husband Barney. After the fire department requires them to cut down a hedge, they are suddenly sucked into the communal life of the very eccentric psychiatrist next door and his cast of eccentric patients, specifically the heroine addicted Maxine. Bingo and Maxine switch places one day as Maxine’s children are about to be confiscated by the State of California. The story moves quickly along as Bingo and Barney accept whatever crazy thing their neighbors are doling out. Bingo thinks about morality and life. This is not a frivolous book. At the end, a wildfire threatens to wipe away their neighborhood, but they all survive to love some more.