The Five Acts of Diego Leon by Alex Espinoza

A Mexican boy comes to Hollywood to become a movie star

Diego Leon, an orphaned half Indian boy, is sent away to his rich grandparents’ house during the time of the Mexican Revolution.  After being groomed to take over his patrician grandfather’s legal business and becoming engaged to a devout young heiress, Diego chucks this preordained life away and leaves for Hollywood to pursue his love of acting.  Once in Hollywood, he is looked down upon because he is Mexican.  Diego sweeps floors, then get a few roles as an extra, then meets a handsome producer.  Suddenly he starts getting bigger parts.  The producer grows tired of him, but eventually Diego, in his final film, perhaps learns to act at last.

The structure is simple – five big chunks. Diego the mestizo living in the Indian village, Diego the young bourgeois living in the city, Diego the immigrant sweeping the floor of a LA café, Diego the struggling actor, and Diego the quasi movie star. The opening part of the novel, set in the Indian village, was truly compelling, and I was gripped wondering what would happen to the boy.  However, after that, the plotting is pretty much nonexistent, the scenes lined up like train cars one after the other, rather than having the events in one scene trigger the next.  The dialogue is expository.  The main problem is that Diego Leon is a robot being pushed along the path of his life.  Is he gay or straight – that seems to be a conflict every so often he encounterse.  He doesn’t seem to consistently feel any lust (either for bodies or for achievements) and I’m not so sure that conforms to real life.  Also, his prime motivation is to be a famous actor, but again, I’m not sure why.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Glimpses of California in the Sixties

In this collection of magazine essays, Joan Didion turns her cool gaze on some California phenomena: a young Joan Baez, hippies in Haight Ashbury, a fishy San Bernardino murder and her childhood memories of the "original” California. Even though Joan Didion is a native, there’s something a little condescending here, a bit East Coasty – oh those nutty West Coasters, with their pomposity about silly things. There’s a Jeremiah flavor going on as well, poetic, completely authoritative, and warning of imminent disaster.

Joan Didion must be one of America’s finest prose stylists.  She also seems like a true conservative, preferring John Wayne to LSD taking toddlers. In the essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she has no sympathy for the earnest hippies, in fact, oozes disapproval. Near the end, the perceptions felt repetitive. After the passage of time, the celebrity pieces, the Joan Baez and John Wayne stuff are essentially slight. But she certainly knows how to dramatically end a scene.

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Eccentrics live on houseboats by the River Thames

Led by Richard, the upper class skipper of Lord Jim, the various houseboat owners in Battersea, maintain not very fixed lives. Nenna, an abandoned wife with two small daughters, lives on the Grace. Maurice, a charmer involved with various criminal enterprises, lives on the Maurice (name changed from the Dondeschiepolschuygen IV) and Willis, an optimistic retired painter, lives on the Dreadnought. Much of the nominal plot concerns a leak on the Dreadnought. The community rallies around Willis when he is injured, and Richard and Nenna form a closer bond when Nenna tracks down her loserish husband. The book ends inconclusively, as all the inhabitants appear headed for new destinies.

Exquisite is the operative word here (however condescending and sexist that term might be). However, this novel definitely is exquisite, packing a dozen characters into a slight number of pages, and composed of miniature scenes which deliver outsize pleasure. The tidal flows of the Thames are the real stars of this book, lifting flotsam and jetsam, moving the plot along, and providing a subject for beautiful flights of prose. The best part of this novel is the dialogue between Nenna’s daughters, the preternaturally responsible Martha and the irrepressible Tilda. Although only six, Tilda knows how to live.

The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr

A man ponders his wasted life

Jun Nakayama, a Japanese actor who possessed a smoldering eroticism on the silent film screens of the past, is invited to audition for a movie. But much has happened in the forty years since his last role, including the wartime interment of the Japanese and the mysterious brutal murder of a popular director. The highlights of Jun’s elderly life are his mountain hikes and studious avoidance of regret. As Jun considers whether to take the part, he revisits the long ago incident which caused him to quit acting. As part of the process of remembering, he meets with his former colleagues, the silent film stars of the past.

Now I’ve had two books in a row with people driving around a specific landscape interviewing people who were witnesses to a traumatic event. Nominally, Jun is trying to find out the chances that his “secret” will leak; the reader is trying to find out what this secret is. The reader is also trying to find out why Jun quit not only his career, but quit on life. That question is never fully answered. Was it racism? Was it sexual fear? Is he afraid of his own emotions? The problem for me was that I didn’t care what happened to Jun – his voice is so restrained and passionless I find it hard to buy that he was a successful actor. And the violent murder at the core of the novel lacks emotional resonance or motivation.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

A traumatized young woman tries to solve the mystery of her family’s murder

The carefully coached testimony of seven year old Libby Day, who barely escaped the night her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered, sends her devil worshipper brother to life in prison. Now an adult, ornery, short of funds, she gets involved with a club of nerdy mass murder enthusiasts who convince her, by means of cash infusions, to ask questions of key figures in the case. After talking to some witnesses, Libby starts to doubt her prior beliefs, and is spurred to continue the search. Eventually she comes to conclusions of her own, conclusions which upset a few people.

I’m not sure if this type of brutally violent murder mystery is my cup of tea. I read this because I loved Gone Girl, and this book happily contains the same kind of pointed social commentary, but this plot and these characters felt a bit more “gimmicky.” Also the solution to the mystery seemed implausible. Not just logically implausible or emotionally implausible, but mechanically implausible. I guess that it usually is. I admired the different points of view, especially the brother’s, which successfully evoked the terror of being guilty of a little thing but getting accused of a much bigger thing.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

An erudite sarcastic pedophile takes the bobby soxed object of his lust on a road trip across the United States

Humbert Humbert, raised on the paradisiacal shores of the Mediterranean in the Hotel Mirana, is bathed in memories of his childhood girlfriend Annabel Leigh and their frantic unsuccessful attempts at love. After an unhappy marriage in Paris, with pit stops in several madhouses, Humbert tries his luck in America. This first person narrator lets us know, early on, that he is erotically attracted, not to fleshy women, but to frail nymphets, little girls on the cusp of puberty. These little girls are depicted, skating, skipping, and coming out of school. Humbert tries to be where they are. Through a series of fortunate plot twists, houses burning down, hips breaking, or Aubrey McFate, as he would say, he encounters Mrs. Haze, with a room to let, and Dolores, her twelve year old daughter. Fat Haze and little Haze. Circumstances conspire to leave him the sole guardian of Dolores. His original plan of drugging Lolita, as he calls her, to have his way with her, changes when the little girl apparently is up for coitus. In hiding, the pair flees across the country, giving Humbert an opportunity to sneer/admire the tawdry grandeur of America. Seeking respite, Humbert gets a job teaching French at a school very much like Wellesley College, enrolling the child in an all girls academy. As Humbert’s jealousy grows, the final part of the book turns farcical, as Humbert pursues the sex fiend who stole Lolita’s heart.

There are three parts to this book; 1) the amazing sentences completely precluding a “quick read”; 2) a love song to “America”; 3) a tragedy about lust and the ego and the inability to stop oneself from destroying another human being. Humbert presents himself as a monster. And he is. The book is split rather neatly in two. The tragedy presented in a cup of satire.

The sentences demand to be reread. This is not a book for skimming, because most of the enjoyment  comes from savoring the words. The sentences detonate – little knife twists with precise vocabulary choices –the high and the low.  I did not know the etymology of the word fascinate before. There are chunks of heavenly writing: The list of children’s names in Lolita/Dolores’s class. The amazing description of the tennis game, which also depicts his love for the girl and his love for life. Humbert views everything with a gimlet eye and right off the bat, the highly satirical truly tragical tone is taken.  The introduction has a deep emotional resonance once reread. Tragedy can’t be fixed.

I wonder if this is psychological accurate portrait of a pedophile. It seems like it is. In an extremely methodical fashion, he grooms her. Most of the time, Humbert is cruel, blinded to the little girl’s humanity. In many ways Lolita is a meditation on consent. He coerces her, maybe at first he seduces her. The book is not pornographic though its currency is the erect penis.  

The beautiful language; the paean to America, the tragedy of the destruction of a little girl’s life. And Lolita is no Little Nell. She’s a petulant brat. However, even a petulant brat deserves to have a childhood.  The plotting is a little wink wink: the hidden journal, the errant car, the house burning down. Nabokov must have enjoyed the thought of all the ignorant Americans scampering to the dictionary to look up the dirty word.

This is a masterpiece.

Aeneid by Virgil

A dispossessed man, harried (and helped) by the gods, founds a great race

Great warrior Aeneas must flee burning Troy with his father on his back and his little son by the hand. Reluctantly, he leads a band of warrior refugees, who trust in the prophecy that Aeneas will bring them to a new home. After some false starts, Aeneas and his followers land in Carthage, where the happy citizens are building a well ordered city under the active leadership of their wise compassionate queen Dido. Cupid, god of love, tricks Dido into falling in love with Aeneas, assisted by Aeneas’s evocative telling of the fall of Troy. Their first tryst is a humdinger, complete with divinely provided lightning bolts and a heavenly chorus of nymphs. But soon Aeneas is brought to his senses by winged Mercury, who brings him a message from big guy Jupiter – get back into those ships. After a quick visit to Hades, Aeneas travels to Italy, where he woos the daughter of the king of Latium. Her fiancé isn’t too happy about that and the last half of the book tells the story of war madness and furious battles.

I enjoyed this poem, a work dense with imagery and metaphor. Every lively stanza provides a glimpse into human nature, which seems not to have changed that much in two thousand years.  I loved all the stories and storylets, such as Venus and Vulcan in their bedroom as she talks him into making Aeneas’s armor. Maybe this is a story about storytelling. Also notable is the depiction of woman. There was an emotional equality between the sexes. As well as Camilla, warrior princess.

There are two parts – the first, quite memorable with amazing imagery, recounting the fall of Troy, the screwed up affair with sympathetic Dido, the trip into Hades to see his father. The second part is a series of boilerplate, if very cinematic, battles – it’s like a sword and sandals epic. Aeneas is presented as gentle, uxorious, not naturally bloodthirsty, though in the final stanza, he is a heartless killing machine. He is always torn between what he wants to do and what he must do to help his people. He must turn into a monster in order to found a great race. Maybe it’s like a Godfather II from the first century BC.

I wish I knew Latin and Greek so I could really appreciate the allusions and the echoes with the Iliad and the Odyssey. I also found it interesting that this was a state sponsored epic.