Robert Tanenbaum Malice read by Mel Foster

A girl detective who can speak a thousand languages, with her own personal Saint,  New York City’s District Attorney as her father, and an ex Viet-Cong guerrilla as a nanny — only Robert Tanenbaum (and the City itself) could conjure up the sad, inscrutable Lucy Karp. As always when we step into Karpland we are stepping into the heart of  Law,  which is not only the territory of language, but the inherited traditions of men and the relationships these traditions imply.

Where men talk privately, they sit; where they sit, they eat and drink and cross identities. Over Marlene Chiampi’s kitchen table, we find lawyers, detectives, Indians and journalists…A student of Karp’s comes to him for help in defending a coach who has been debunked by his Association, robbed of the liberty to ply his trade. And as always in a Christian kitchen,  food and tragedy mix. At the end of the second bottle of Chianti, the phone rings with news that Ariadne Stupenegel is injured in the bombing of a restaurant — where she was mixing food and words, food and information, food and secrets.

The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett read by Stephen Hogan

“You know how Thais are: totally fair minded Buddhists until their personal income is threatened.”

For we farang,  the improbability of Thailand is as good as fiction. Where else would one find a dejected pot-smoking homicide detective and his long-haired assistant, a “Kathoey transsexual who has not yet scraped together the courage or the funds for the final op” ? How else could one be brought to believe in the existence of  sect of nuns who meditate on dead bodies –

 ”four hours sleep per night, near starvation rations, no electricity, …they were not allowed real bodies anymore but the local hospitals provided them with photographs of cadavers … ” ?

Unless they were located in a wat in the far east of Thailand, near the border with Laos? What is more tragic than a spoiled, mantic, beautiful Chinese witch, whose  pharmaceutical grade cocoa, once tasted, is forever craved? Or  the story of Rosie, the Australian hairdresser, who only wanted enough money to buy a condo in Sydney and live a real life,

it was a one-off I was going to open a beauty salon, there’s a new development of Rose Bay, I wanted south-facing, I was going to be “Rosie of Rose Bay,”….

…and who is now the unfortunate guest of the woman’s prison at Thonburi, having failed to smuggle the condom nestling 100% pure heroin inside her vagina through customs.  A story is always many stories: and the best stories are localizable.

Gun Games by Faye Kellerman read by Mitchell Greenberg

Short, spoiled and operatic is the 14 year old Persian Jewess who charms Gabe, the poor little rich foundling now living with Peter and Rena Decker. Gabe is a little lovable, a little weird, and very horny. But he is also a musical prodigy, with the lean blonde wits of his assassin father — the unforgettable and immemorial Chris Donatti. Once upon a time, long long ago, Chris Donati also went to highschool in L.A., fell in love in L.A., got in trouble in L.A.

Today L.A. is full of  over-monied teenagers with guns, some suicidal, or maybe not. In between the clumsy  romantic gropings of Gabe and his sobbing Persian Jewess are  the good, old police investigations of Marge and Oliver, a little older, a little tired, a little weepy themselves. Are the high-school suicides really suicides? The whodunit falls by the wayside, unfortunately, and neither the fascinating Donatti nor his curious son can mobilize by this L.A. West Side story.

The Wreckage by Michael Robotham read by Sean Barrett

The perfect voice for a down and out in London and Iraq crime novel, with an entry quote by Orwell. Always a good sign, Orwell. Imagine a classic sting by a pretty girl and her boyfriend: girl alone at bar gets hit by her bruiser boyfriend. Retired police detective comes to the rescue, takes girl home. Girl slips him a mickey, empties his wallet, and splits.

But this is more than a crime novel; listen:

The old man blinks at him.

“You are not an Arab?

“No.”

“What is your religion?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Who is your god?”

“I have no God.”

“What sort of man has no god? What  does he believe in? Why does he live?”

“He lives because he is a man.”

“You are American?”

“I was born there. My mother is Iraqi.”

“I like George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenneger.”

 

Between Sisters by Kristin Hannah read by Laural Merlington

Think about a perfect sandwich. A happy assemblage of fresh food: bacon, lettuce, tomato. Good and familiar characters, pretty or restful setting, easy, recognizable relationships. Funny dialogue. Simple white or brown bread. A little bit of mayo.  There’s a singular and single female divorce lawyer with a very hungry sex and a very low opinion of men in general and husbands in particular. There’s a weekly meeting with Aunty Shrink. Then there’s her sister. The country mouse: the good friend-good neighbor-good daughter-good mother type with no money but lots of sisterhood. The horny female lawyer who is   or should be a redhead,  organizes sis’s country wedding, meets a sad ex-ile (ex-husband, ex-doctor, ex-person)  and well ……

Why would a novelist want to turn the lawyer into another Doris Day? Like starting out  chumping on a BLT and ending up with the taste of a chocolate covered marshmallow.

The Measure

There should be and will be a measure of a good writer, which is the number of words it takes for the reader to be INSIDE the story. Up, up and away. Peter Robinson: 10. Kristin Hannah/Hannah Kristin: 25. Ernest Hemingway: 4.

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell read by Richard Green

A gentle voice with exacting intelligence  mourns England, its living unemployed and its generation of  tall, dead men:

Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my childhood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys .. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. (p. 98)

But this entire work is a critique that might well have been directed at America, at today’s America, at its unhealthy way of living, its’cheap substitutes for everything’, its ‘tinned food’ which is a ‘deadlier weapon than the machine gun’, its wastage, its UNEMPLOYMENT.

“It is usually impossible to buy wholemeal bread in a working-class district.” .. the working class palate now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have gtinnerd milk, even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters.

A Storm at Fairacre, Village Diary, Changes at Fairacre by Miss Read read by Gwen Watford

A pleasant lyrical description of the minute details of English country life presents the full world of a small town’s folk, in all their deep old  habits, their social quirks and irritabilities, and their precious sense of the finite order of inherited obligations.

Mrs Willett can tackle a hundred jobs without having been taught any of them. She can salt pork or beef, make jams, jellies, wines, chutnies and pickles, she can bake pies with all manner of pastries, cakes, tarts, and her own bread, which is particularly delicious, she can make rugs, curtains and her own clothes, she can help a neighbor in childbirth, and at the other end of  life’s span compose a corpse’s limbs for decent burial. She is as good a gardener as her husband, can distemper a room, mend a fuse, and sings in the choir. …. There are so many different activities to engage her that when she tires of one there is another to which she can turn and get refreshment. From turning her heavy old mangle in the washhouse she will come in and sit down to stitch a new skirt. She will prepare a stew and while it simmers on the hob filling the little house with its fragrance, she will practice her part in Mr Annets new anthem, ready for the next Church festival. And… she sees a satsifying result from her labours. The clothes blow on the line. The skirt is  folded and put away in the drawer ready for next Sunday. Mr  Willett will come in and praise her bubbling stew…

In this little English village is a little English school with children who are kept busy snipping gum nosed paper in all the colors of the rainbow.

“Make just what you like: flowers, leaves, lambs, birds, butterflies…anything that makes you think of Spring.
Most of the class had flung themselves with abandon into this glorious snipping session but there were as always one or two stolid and adenoidal babies who were completely without imagination and awaited direction apathetically. “Make grass then”…had said Miss Jackson…

 

From Fairacre to Thrush Green, a  village inferior in coziness and character, whereof spring faithless wives, drunken gravediggers,  vain architects and  stingy spinsters.. With this inferiority comes humor: imagine a fat food-loving Nellie housecleaning for three aged sisters, who spoon out a teaspoon of silver polish each time she comes to clean the house.

.

A Friend From England by Anita Brookner read by Cherie Lunghi

Rest, it seems, is a peculiarly English thing. Restfulness in all its timorous, melancholic glory cushions the indoor lives of Oscar and Dorrie Livingstone, in a peculiarly English way. Not as the accidental sidebar of an otherwise busied existence but as an aspiration, a calling, a rigorous end in itself.  Oscar is

…a bulky soft-voiced man with beautifully cared for hands. Something about him broadcasting the resignation of a schoolboy who has to submit to an inspection before he is allowed to leave the house.

All in all they are a placid wistful couple, resigned and melancholy by themselves and for each other. Well fed, well napped, well sheltered they form a restful destination for the nervous, ambitious, insecure and disinclined Rachel Kennedy who would have liked to see herself in this pink shell of kinship and central heating. Miss Kennedy takes up a remote and impassive alliance with Heather, the passive offspring of this mildly inert, mildly well off couple who accommodates her parents imagination by pretending to manage her own clothing shop in London, a Daisy Miller with short hair, unexcitable and worrisome.

She would glide from virginity to matronhood with no sense of a change in her condition. She would duplicate her mother, succeed her, and no doubt become the center of the family circle in her own home with the full approbation of that mother whom she planned so closely to copy… As she sat there emotionless and smiling in the midst of this agitated assembly,  she looked like the bride in a Breughel painting, as if she were already at her own wedding breakfast.

Rachel Kennedy lives a perfectly balanced and satisfyingly sombre life, too glad to come to rest at the Livingstone family home, to inhabit the functionary role of ‘friend’, to perform the duties of that functionary, like a glum, gloved observer at a greenhouse of rest. Here she studies English life, exacting a micro-analytics of personality and sensibility and mood as meticulous as a clinical formula.

This is where I leave you by Jonathan Tropper performed by Ramon de Ocampo

If you’re Jewish and you have a brother and he’s still married, this is NOT how he will sound after he divorces his goyishe wife who you’ve never liked anyway. Because the person reading this acid-funny tale doesn’t have the nasal force or the resentful irregularity or that specific Jewish brand of ironic despair in the face of public failure that dunks every insult, every complaint, every abusive remark (“This is my brother Judd… Judd is recently cuckolded.”) in borscht-belt tenderness.

When this brother is summoned home to your father’s funeral, he will be driving forward but wishing in reverse.

When people give directions to any home or business in West Covington they use [my parent's house] as a negative landmark. If you see the big white house then you’ve gone too far. Which is precisely what I’m thinking.

Your sister will have installed a high tech baby monitor in the front hall, so you can all hear the baby screaming in amplified stereo as you eat lunch but

…she doesn’t seem at all inclined to go upstairs and quiet the baby. “We’re letting her cry” she announces, like it’s a movement they’ve joined.

If you’re Jewish, this imaginary brother is sitting shiva in hell, i.e. surrounded by his family, thinking about his divorce from a beautiful woman who he had once been able to make laugh. Once, he’d

read enough Playboy … to know that beautiful women want a man who can make them laugh. Of course what they really meant was a man who can make them laugh after he delivered multiple orgasms on his private jet with his trustee 9 inch cock.

If you’re not Jewish, you already knew this. But you may be interested in this unhappy family’s way of being unhappy. I doubt it.