Portrait of Michelangelo

Although it dropped out of first place,  The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone made the bestseller list for the second time in 1962. You can read my review in the archives from 2011.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Stockholm by Night

In The Prize, Irving Wallace knits threads about Cold War political intrigue, Nazi atrocities, gutter press journalism, and the Nobel Prize awards into a complex yarn that ends with no loose ends.

The main character is the year’s literature recipient, Andrew Craig, an American novelist who traded his pencil for a bottle after his wife died in a car crash with him at the wheel. In Stockholm, Andrew falls for a girl brought up by her uncle, the physics honoree, after her parents perished at the hands of the Nazis. Andrew discovers Emily has some war stories of her own.

Other Nobel winners who figure in the story are a French husband-wife research team and an American doctor with a chip on his shoulder big enough to require psychiatric removal.

The secondary characters are presented with broad strokes; the main characters are only slightly more individuals. But Wallace uses the history of the Nobel Prize to tie all the disparate threads together, making the implausible plot seem as inevitable as the annual awards themselves.

The ending seems a bit too pat and romantic; however, it’s hard to see how a novel about the world’s most illustrious award could be anything but romantic.

Photo of Stockholm by Night uploaded by Wyrls

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Great Penformances reviews are now available to visitors at The Oneida Daily Dispatch website.

I look forward to hearing from of the Dispatch and of vintage novels who live in upstate New York’s Madison County and Southern Oneida County.

Thanks to editor Kurt Wanfried for adding Great Penformances reviews to his blog offerings.

The White House

Seven Days in May is a thriller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, a pair of newspaper reporters whose knowledge of the mid-twentieth century Washington political realities infuse every page.

One May Sunday, Marine Colonel Martin J. Casey uncovers what he thinks could be a plot by his boss, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Scott to overthrow the President. Putting his job on the line, Casey discloses his suspicions to the President.

President Lyman takes some convincing, but as evidence mounts, he decides to act. He will act secretly, with help from just a few trusted men and his long-time secretary.

The characters are drawn in broad outline, recognizable as types rather than individuals.

Knebel and Bailey’s strong point is plot. Fifty years after first publication, the story sounds even more plausible than it did against the landscape of the 1960s. If anything, the fictional President’s observation that a frustrated electorate, feeling unable to influence events has “seriously started looking for a superman” rings more true today than it did in 1962.

As to the rest of the setting—a President the people are not quite sure of, high unemployment, economic insecurity, apprehension over potential foreign attacks—sounds like the morning news to me.

Photo of The White House by Edgar0587

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Nuclear Warning

During a military exercise, American bombers armed with nuclear weapons streak off past the fail-safe point, headed for Moscow.

Watching blips on the air command’s radar screen blink are a congressman and a manufacturer whose equipment went into the complex system intended to make the nuclear deployment program accident-proof. All hope fervently that the radar reports are wrong.

Russians watching their radar screens are also convinced the problem is in the display: nothing has prepared them for an attack or an American accident.

The President calls Krushchev.

To prevent an unprovoked attack on Moscow, the President first tries to shoot down the US planes. When that does not work, he seizes the only option available to avert World War III.

With that material to work from and their taut prose, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler could not help turning out a thriller.

Fail-Safe, however, is not just a few hours’ entertainment. It’s a reminder that in any complex, untested system, the occurrence of several statistically improbable errors can bring the whole system crashing down. Perhaps if that lesson had been learned from this novel, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might not have come as such as shock to the American public.

Illustration Nuclear Warning 2 by Flaivoloka

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Pat Ryan has written a retrospective for the New York Times mingling historical perspective on Wharton’s work with insights into the  American fascination with British aristocracy as evidenced in the popularity of the  mini-series “Downton Abbey” currently in its second season on PBS.

Check out the accompanying slide show for marvelous photos of people and places of Wharton’s era.

I reviewed  Wharton’s famous 1921 bestselling novel, The Age of Innocence, here last year.

Linda Gorton Aragoni

"It's Academic" would have suited Franny & Zooey

The number five best seller for 1962 was a holdover from the 1961 list: Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger.  You can read my review in the archives from my reviews in 2011.

Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville, North Carolina

Youngblood Hawke is Herman Wouk’s contribution to the shelf of novels by novelists about novelists. The novel has the usual plot complications readers expect as the rube with the typewriter is taken on, taken in, and taken over by shysters.

The story opens with Arthur Youngblood Hawke’s sale of his first novel to Prince House. The novel is promising rather than good.

Art figures he needs to write about seven books before he’ll know his craft. He aims to be first a successful author, then a rich one, living off his investments while he writes great books.

Art invests the income from his books in enterprises from hog futures and commercial real estate to self-publishing. His financial successes and failures are spectacular, but they are never what’s important to him. His world is the pad of lined yellow paper that he fills hour after hour.

Like most other novels about novelists, Youngblood Hawke contrasts the mercenary publishing world with the world of the art. But Wouk’s cast of colorful characters makes clear that the profit motive operates throughout society: even artists have to eat.

And the most tenacious of the followers after fortune may be somebody’s mother.

[Herman Wouk based Youngblood Hawke  on the life of Thomas Wolfe.  The photo above shows the boarding house owned and operated by Wolfe's mother where Wolfe lived until he went to college.]

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Wallace at University of Alabama

Allen Drury followed up his blockbuster novel Advise and Consent with A Shade of Difference, which builds on events and characters from that novel.

In the mid-twentieth century, “Terrible Terry,”a Western-educated leader of a British possession, is seeking UN help in getting immediate independent status for his African country.  Terry has the support of the Communist countries as well as the non-aligned and anti-American nations. More important, Terry has the support of the liberal segment of Americans always ready to denounce their nation.

When Terry dramatically escorts a black girl to integrate a white Southern school, he unleashes a violent clash of races and political opponents.

An experienced political reporter, Drury writes with an insider’s knowledge and a propagandist’s aim.

However, he’s also a capable story teller, who never forgets that readers come for the story. His omniscient character descriptions are borne out by the words and actions of those characters.

The most startling aspect of A Shade of Difference is how contemporary the story feels. Representative Cullee Hamilton, caught in the conflict between the races and his own political ambitions is a fictional sixties Barack Obama.

Whatever your political leanings, you will find intrigue and entertainment in the pages of this political thriller.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni

Wedding ceremony photo by Katman1972

Anne Morrow Lindbergh described Dearly Beloved as reflections in a fictional frame. The frame is a June wedding in a private New England home attended by family and close friends. The occasion triggers the circle around the bride and groom to ponder the meaning of marriage in modern society.

Dearly Beloved is short enough to read in an evening, but best read a chapter or two at a time. The characters’ interior monologues are designed to trigger similar monologues by readers.

Lindbergh suggests that two people going through very similar circumstances can react very differently because of the attitude and experiences they bring to it.

The bridesmaid and best man look forward to marriage, but with quite different ideas of what a happy marriage would be.

The maiden aunt wonders considers whether she missed anything by not marrying.

The married men and women wonder if their marriages could be happier. One woman chooses divorce, another chooses to remain married. One man ministers to a dying wife because of love, another has affairs to escape the routine of life with a woman who bores him.

After letting readers stand in the shoes of her characters, Lindbergh leaves them to decide for themselves whether marriage still matters.

© 2012 Linda Gorton Aragoni