1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

The Author:

Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974) was born in Philadelphia to a painter and a schoolteacher.  After graduating high school, Susann left to New York City to pursue a career as an actor, landing a series of bit parts on film, television and the stage, eventually landing a steady gig on stage.  In New York, she met press agent Irving Mansfield, who she married in 1939.  Mansfield went on to manage her career and made sure that she appeared in the papers.  Susann got a recurring part on The Morey Amsterdam Show and landed bigger stage roles.

Susann's reputation, however, was tarnished with love affairs.  This included Joe Lewis, a comedian and singer.  When Mansfield was drafted to the US military in 1943, Susann filed for separation and planned to marry Lewis.  Lewis, however, signed up for a USO tour and ended the affair.  Susann and Mansfield reunited in 1944.  In 1946, they had a son they named Guy. Guy was autistic and was sent to an institution as young child.  The most recent article with any authority I could find was dated 1983, and at that time Guy was still institutionalized.

Susann continued to have a career in television, including hosting her own short-lived talk show.  In 1962, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy.  In 1963, she published her first book, Every Night, Josephine! to commercial success.  In 1966 she published her most successful novel, Valley of the Dolls.  The book was critically panned.  Susann became a celebrity author and in 1969 ended up in a public feud with Truman Capote, both insulting each other on television.

In 1973, Susann was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.  The disease killed her in 1974.

The Book:

Length: 442 pages
Subject/Genre: Women's issues/Roman a Clef

I just want to put this up front:  I did not like this book.  Valley of the Dolls focuses on three women trying to make it in New York City, and for all its heavy-handed pro-independence messages, the women are unlikable and almost insultingly two-dimensional.  The novel is split into three sections, the first focusing on Anne Welles.  Welles comes from a small town to make a life for herself in New York City.  She's beautiful and wants to fall in love.  That last sentence is the sum of her character.  Susann consistently relies upon what is one of my biggest pet peeves in writing.  I'm sure you've heard the old advice, show don't tell.  Screw that advice, but don't tell me one thing, show me another, and expect me to believe both.  Other characters and even the narrator will state qualities about Anne's character, but Anne never exhibits any of these qualities!  We're told she's standoffish, but she's consistently a pushover.  We're told she's a remarkable secretary, but at that point the only task we've seen her perform was completed by someone else, in this case, Allen Cooper, the millionaire who fell in love with her.

That's another problem with Anne.  She never solves her own problems.  She comes to New York, and is immediately given a good job because she's so beautiful.  One could argue that this is a criticism of the shallowness of society, or that she's judged exclusively by her looks, but this argument would carry a lot more weight if Anne were not a complete Mary Sue with no personality of her own. In my research I came across a review of the book by Nora Ephron which is relevant here: "Valley had a message that had a magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy--of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men--and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book--who took pills, killed themselves, and made general messes of their lives." 

While the 'dolls' in the title refers to barbiturates, it can just as well refer to the characters, not just in the sense that they are seen as objects in a male-dominated world, but in the sense that they are vacant approximations of women for the reader to project a personality onto.  However, it's this very mirror-like effect, along with the controversy, that made the book so popular.  

A film version was released in 1967, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke.  The film, like the book, was a commercial success and a critical failure.  

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is that the original screenplay (which was later revised to give it a happier ending) was written by SF demi-god Harlan Ellison, who is a significant figure in the Spec-Fic movement whose screenwriting credits include The Outer Limits and Star Trek (his episode of the latter went on to win a Hugo Award). I realize this is tangential, but it's always strange to see a writer who's a huge deal in one field write a movie in a completely different field, especially when the movie turns out badly (which may be why Ellison remained uncredited).    
Also notable was the would-be sequel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which ended up as a satire of the source material, and is one of the three films that Roger Ebert helped write (the other two being Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)).    

Look, this isn't a well-written book.  It's characters are flat and with no personalities of their own, the writing is rife with rhetorical questions to hammer in the point just made, because subtlety isn't a concern.  If your looking for a book about the position of women in the 20th century, read Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Read The Bell Jar.  Read Mrs. Dalloway.  Read Nightwood.  Read A Visit From the Goon Squad.  Read The Hours.  The fact is, this is a pretty poor book, and one that's tedious and frustrating to read if you ever stop to think about something as simple as character motivation.

Bestsellers of 1966:

1. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
2. The Adventurers by Harold Robbins
3. The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton
4. Capable of Honor by Allen Drury
5. The Double Image by Helen MacInnes
6. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
7. Tell No Man by Adela Rogers St. Johns
8. Tai-Pan by James Clavell
9. The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss
10. All in the Family by Edwin O'Connor

Also Published in 1966:

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
John Fowles - The Magus
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner
Anne Sexton - Live or Die
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Hunter S. Thompson - Hell's Angels

Sources:
"Jacqueline Susann." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource 
     Center. Web.

1965: The Source by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.  

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.

The Book:

Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction

The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel.  This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.

Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions.  He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose.  The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.    

This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research.  Israel is still a hot topic today.

The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation.  In this case, it's not surprising.  The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.  

The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work.  I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness.  This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.  

Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source  is a good, if long, book for you.

Bestselling Novels of 1965:

1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk


Also Published in 1966:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird

Sources:

Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.

A Change of Schedule

Unfortunately, due to coursework, I'll have to switch back to an every-other-week posting schedule for main book reviews.  My review of James Michener's The Source will be posted next Monday.

1964: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

The Author:

John le Carré (1931-  ) is the pseudonym of David Cornwell.  He was born in Poole, Dorset, England.  His mother abandoned the family when he was five years old.  His father had a troubled relationship with the law, and was connected to organized crime.

His family was financially volatile, his father making large sums of money and losing it, time after time.  In 1948, le Carré attended the University of Bern, Switzerland, to study foreign languages.  In 1950 he joined the British Army's Intelligence Corps before returning to England in 1952.  He married Alison Sharp in 1954.  It is around this point that le Carré joined MI5.  In 1960, he transferred from MI5 to MI6 (MI5 is the domestic intelligence agency, MI6 is the international.  The rough U.S. equivalent would be the NSA and the CIA). Le Carré ran operations within the intelligence community, led interrogations and tapped communications.  He published his first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) under a pseudonym due to MI6 regulations.  His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was an international bestseller and won le Carré the Somerset Maugham Award for young British writers.

Le Carré left MI6 in 1964 after his identity was compromised, and became a full time writer.  He divorced Sharp in 1971 and married Valérie Eusatce in 1972.  He had eight more appearances on the annual bestsellers list including 1974's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Le Carré and his wife currently live in St. Buryan, Cornwall, U.K.


The Book:

Length: 256 pages

Subject/Genre: Cold War/Espionage

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is technically the third book in a series of interconnected stories, but reading the previous two novels is not necessary to understanding this one (I didn't even realize it was a sequel until after I'd finished reading it).  The novel follows Alec Leamas, a middle-aged spy in command of East German espionage.  The novel starts with him waiting at the border for an East German asset to cross into safe territory.  Every other asset Leamas had has been murdered.

The rest of the novel focuses on Leamas as he pretends to defect to East Germany and seeks to bring down the head of East Germany's secret police, Hans-Dieter Mundt while trying to keep safe the innocent woman who's gotten mixed up in it all.

I've never been a huge fan of the espionage genre, but I really enjoyed The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  While the major focus in on the unfolding mystery of secret informants and obscure instructions, le Carré creates a world where moral ambiguity is the status quo, and anything that gets the desired results is accepted as a good thing by those in charge, regardless of the damage it does to any operatives or citizens.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold met with (and still receives) considerable critical acclaim.  Publishers Weekly has listed it as the best spy novel and TIME Magazine included it in their list of the 100 best novels since 1923.  A film version starring Richard Burton was released in 1965.

If you like espionage novels, or if you don't like espionage novels but want to be won over, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a good choice.




Bestsellers of 1964:

1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
2. Candy  by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow  
4. Armageddon by Leon Uris
5. The Man by Irving Wallace
6. The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
7. The Martyred by Richard E. Kim
8. You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
9. This Rough Magic by Mary Stweart
10. Convention by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Baily II

Also Published in 1964:

Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
William Golding - The Spire

Sources:

Le Carré, John. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. New York, Coward-McCann Inc, 1963.
        Print.

1963: The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West

The Author:

Morris West (1916-1999) was born near Melbourne, Australia.  He received a B.A. from the University of Melbourne in 1937, and taught modern languages and mathematics in New South Wales and Tasmania.  He spent twelve years studying with the Christian Brother Order, studying for the priesthood, but left in 1941. West gained notoriety as a director with Australasian Radio Productions, where he worked from 1943-53. He left Australia in 1955, taking up residence in numerous countries on multiple continents.

His first book, Moon in My Pocket, was published under the pseudonym Julian Morris in 1945.  His next book was published in 1956.  Between 1956 and 1959, he published eight books, under his own name and the pseudonym Michael East.  The most famous of these, at the time, was 1959's The Devil's Advocate, which he wrote after spending six months as the Daily Mail's Vatican correspondent.  The book received critical and commercial success.  The next novel published under his own name, Daughter of Silence, was the #8 bestselling novel in the U.S. for 1961.  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963) was his biggest commercial success.  He appears on the top ten annual bestsellers list twice more, in 1965 for The Ambassador and in 1968 for The Tower of Babel.  

The Book:

Length: 374 pages

Subject/Genre: Catholicism, World Politics/Political Thriller

"The pope is dead."  Now the cardinals must elect a new pope, and the unlikely electee is the new Ukranian cardinal, Kiril, now Kiril I, who spent 17 years in a Siberian prison camp and only escaped to the West three days before the election.  Or was he released?  Switching between an omniscient third person narration and excerpts from the new pope's secret diary, we are given a picture of a man who, within the course of a year, went from a prisoner to a pontiff (although Kiril isn't sure there's much of a difference).  Now Kamanev, the man who tortured and tried to destroy him (and is rumored to have orchestrated his release), is leader of the Soviet Union, and it's up to Kiril to try to prevent a war between U.S. and the U.S.S.R.    This takes place among a few subplots, the political intrigue of the Vatican, and frequent pontificating on faith, goodness, etc.

This is far from the first book about priests on my list.  The bestselling novels of 1913, 1927, 1935, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1948, 1950, 1952, and 1953 have been about priests, preachers, and prophets and saints.  The Shoes of the Fisherman happens to be the meeting point between the religious trend pre-1960s, and the political thrillers/conspiracy novels to come (e.g. le Carré, Ludlum, Clancy, Brown).  Of the lot Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis, 1927) is my favorite.  Shoes is tied for second for my favorite of the priest novels, alongside Cronin's The Keys of the Kingdom (1941).  While religion is obviously a huge part of the plot and character development, unlike most of the other priest novels, it's not just preaching to the choir (pun intended).   West creates a pope who is unsure of himself, who is a complex character with serious doubts and insecurities: he creates a human character, not an archetype or a caricature.  Many of the lead priest characters are two dimensional, or are given flaws that are entirely affected, flaws that are only one small life-lesson from being completely vanquished.

The novel was adapted for the screen in 1968, starring Anthony Quinn as Pope Kiril I and Laurence Olivier as Kamanev.

I apologize for the brevity of this week's review.  A lot of coursework is piling up and I have to get around to that, too (and maybe have a social life?).  Anyway, The Shoes of the Fisherman is a good political intrigue novel, and a good priest novel.  If either or both of those interest you, this would be a good choice.

Bestsellers of 1963:

1. The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West
2. The Group by Mary McCarthy
3. Raise Hight the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
4. Caravans by James Michener
5. Elizabeth Appleton by John O'Hara
6. Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell
7. City of Night by John Rechy
8. The Glass-Blowers by Daphne du Maurier
9. The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna
10. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita by Rumer Godden


Also published in 1963:

Pierre Boulle - The Planet of the Apes
Julio Cortázar - Hopscotch
John Fowles - The Collector
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
Thomas Pynchon - V.
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Charles Webb - The Graduate

Sources:

"Morris L(anglo) West." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature 
     Resource Center. Web.

West, Morris. The Shoes of the Fisherman. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1963. Print.

1962: Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

The Author:

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was born Callie Russell Porter.  Her father was a farmer in Indian Creek, Texas, until his wife, Katherine’s mother, died in when Katherine was only two years old.  Her father then moved the family to his mother’s home in Kyle, Texas.  His mother was named Catherine Anne Porter and was the main adult figure from the author’s childhood.

Catherine died in 1901, and the Porter family moved to San Antonio, where Katherine was briefly enrolled at a private dramatic arts school, before financial hardships made tuition untenable and the family moved to Victoria, Texas.  In 1906, sixteen year old Porter married John Koontz and converted to Roman Catholicism.  She left Koontz in 1914, and went to Chicago to take up work as a film extra.  When she officially divorced Koontz in 1915, she changed her name from Callie Russell to Katherine Anne.

In addition to the divorce and name change, 1915 was the year Porter moved to Dallas and came down with tuberculosis.  While recovering from the disease, she befriended Kitty Crawford, who ran the Fort Worth Critic with her husband.  She hired Porter, setting her on the path of being a professional writer.  In 1919, she moved to New York, where she made a living doing PR and ghostwriting and developed a relationship with the Mexican revolutionary movement, later taking trips through Mexico (just six years after Ambrose Bierce’s disappearance down south).

Porter married Ernest Stock in 1925 but the two divorced soon after.  She published several short stories near the end of the 1920’s and her first short story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories was published in 1930.  Porter was awarded the Guggenheim fellowship in 1931, then left for Europe with Eugene Pressly, who she would marry in 1933 in Paris.  She returned to the U.S. in 1936 and divorced Pressly in 1938, marrying Albert Erskine ten days later and divorcing him in 1942.

Her only novel, Ship of Fools, was the biggest commercial success of her career.  The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award. (1965) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award.

The Book:

Length: 497 pages

Subject/Genre: Human interaction/literary realism

The majority of Ship of Fools takes place aboard the German ship Vera, traveling from Veracruz, Mexico to Germany in the Fall of 1931. Porter includes a list of characters, their nationalities, and who they are bunkmates with, at the beginning of the book, and it's a necessary inclusion.  Their are nearly forty named characters on that list, and many unnamed ones (e.g. "the bride" and "the political agitator").  All are heading to Europe with hopes of some kind, an easy retirement, financial success, a recaptured youth, etc.  

Porter said of the novel: "My book is about the constant endless collusion between good and evil; I believe that human beings are capable of total evil, but no one has ever been totally good: and this gives the edge to evil."  The human flaws, nationalism, bigotry, cowardice, and indifference that would lead to the rise of Nazism are to be found in the passengers of the Vera.  The story is in many ways hermetic, focusing on this one group almost always at sea, the plot arising entirely out of the characters interactions and introspections.  As I previously mentioned, there is a large cast of characters and no main character, which at times make the novel seem to have forty subplots, but no main plot.  While the individual vignettes are generally fantastic, the structure makes the novel flow like, well, a month-long sea voyage.  Now, this may be intentional, like the increasing complexity and incomprehensibility of Heart of Darkness, or the the hallucinatory/surreality of Gravity's Rainbow, but I can't help feel that Ship of Fools is really a novel of stories, except the stories flow into each other instead of having their own space to breathe.  

Quibbles about how the story should be structured aside, Porter creates complex characters who behave in a realistic fashion.  I wrote that the subject was human interaction but humanity's flaws would work as well.  As cliche as the phrase "scathing indictment" may be, I think it may be accurate to apply it here.  Ship of Fools is a scathing indictment of mankind's small-mindedness and capacity for evil.    

Porter was in her 70s when Ship of Fools was published and had a sterling reputation to launch the book from.  The critical reviews were generally very positive and a film version was produced in 1965, starring Vivien Leigh (Scarlett in Gone with the Wind) in her last film role.

I feel like I would have enjoyed Ship of Fools more if I had less of a schedule to maintain.  It's not a quick read, but if you have the time and patience, and like character driven realism, then Ship of Fools is a good choice.  

Bestsellers of 1962:

1. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

2. Dearly Beloved by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

3. A Shade of Difference by Allen Drury

4. Youngblood Hawke by Herman Wouk

5. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

6. Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler

7. Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II

8. The Prize by Irving Wallace

9. The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

10. The Reivers by William Faulkner

Also published in 1962:
Edward Albee - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
James Clavell - King Rat
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Aldous Huxley - Island
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
James Jones - The Thin Red Line
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley in Search of America
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 10. New York, Scribner.
Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Co., 1962. Print.

Three Unlikely Bestsellers Based on Winnie the Pooh

Everyone knows A. A. Milnes's classic children's book, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), which he wrote for his son, Christopher Robin Milne.  The character was based on Christopher Robin's stuffed bear (which was actually named 'Edward'), and many other characters were based on his son's stuffed animals.  

The "real-life" Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, and Eeyore

That Winnie the Pooh would inspire future best-sellers is not surprising.  Surprisingly, there have only been two sequels to the the original children's book: The House on Pooh Corner by Milne (1928) and Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus (2009).  No one looking just at the original book would have been able to guess the odd nature of the books it inspired (don't worry, they're not Wicked-esque semi-erotic retellings).  

If you were going to use Winnie the Pooh to teach people something, what would it be?  If your answer was "Eastern philosophy," then you're either very odd, or you've heard of Benjamin Hoff's 1982 bestseller, The Tao of Pooh (or you are Benjamin Hoff, in which case, "Hi, Benjamin Hoff!").  Famous in its own right, Hoff's book explains Taoist principles through the stories of Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie the Pooh, it seems, is the embodiment of the Taoist principle of wei wu wei, which can be translated as 'action without action' or 'effortless doing.'  The Tao of Pooh became a popular college textbook for a while.  It also spawned a sequel that made the bestsellers list in 1992:

While books about Pooh, Piglet, and Lao Tzu may seem like unusual fodder for the bestsellers list, they have a leg up on the other Pooh bestseller. You see, Tao and Te were at least written in a language their audience could understand.    

This is 1961's Winnie ille Pu, and no you didn't misread that book cover, this is a Latin translation of the 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh by Alexander Lenard, and it is the only Latin book to ever make the New York Times bestsellers list.  In 1998, Brian Staples published Winnie ille Pu Semper Ludet, a Latin translation of The House on Pooh Corner. (To the best of my knowledge, it never made the bestsellers list.)