By Larry Mazzeno

On a recent trip I ended up staying one night at a Country Inn & Suites, which prides itself on having a ‘lending library’ – a small collection of books that are available for guests to take with them if they’ve not finished reading them by checkout time. All one is asked to do is return the book to a Country Inn & Suite location – presumably on the next visit. Not having anything to read that evening, I picked up a copy of British writer David Lodge’s Small Truths, a slim novella published in 1999. Ten minutes into the story, I was hooked.

Small Truths, adapted from a play Lodge wrote a year earlier, tells the story of three people who were an inseparable trio in college. When the novel opens, all are approaching middle age. Adrian Ludlow is a former novelist who now compiles anthologies; he and his wife Eleanor live in a nondescript suburb in London. Though they have drifted apart from their university friend Sam Sharp, a prolific screenplay writer, they apparently are not surprised when arrives at their home one Sunday complaining about a savage profile of him recently published in a prominent London paper by Fanny Tarrant. The young gossip columnist makes it a point of attacking public figures and exposing their foibles and failings – the ‘small truths’ referred to in the title. Adrian and Sam cook up a plan to get back at Tarrant by having her come to interview Adrian while he secretly gathers information to write an unflattering profile of her. The plan backfires, of course, and Tarrant ends up learning much about the Ludlows and Sharp that they all thought they could keep buried. How this happens is at times deliciously humorous, at times depressingly sad. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that Fanny does a similar hatchet job on Adrian. In a climactic final scene, Tarrant shows up at the Ludlows’ home with disturbing news. No one will be reading her profile of Adrian, she says, because the papers are carrying a much more compelling story: News of a tragic accident involving Princess Diana, driven to her death – some would say literally – by the papparazi, whose insatiable appetite for ‘dirt’ knows no bounds.

Lodge does much in the space of a hundred pages, letting the dialogue carry the story and exposing his characters’ thoughts and motivations through clever conversation and an occasional authorial observation. Most importantly, Lodge’s novel asks some compelling questions: How much should we know about others’ private lives? Is it acceptable for reporters to dig into the lives of the rich and famous, no matter what the cost? And what does it say about the rest of us, who support this kind of activity by buying up newspapers and magazines filled with salacious tidbits about celebrities? The answers to those questions might reveal some ‘small truths’ about ourselves.

By Larry Mazzeno

Last month I finished reading C. J. Sansom’s Revelation, the fourth novel in his Matthew Shardlake mystery series. If you are one of those people who likes to read mysteries, is a fan of history, and enjoys long novels with lots of serious sub-plots, Sansom’s novels may be just the ticket.

The Shardlake mysteries are set in Tudor England. Henry VIII is on the throne and making changes, especially with respect to religion. People are taking sides, some remaining loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, some eagerly accepting Henry’s reforms, and a few going even farther than the King wishes, embracing the teaching of radicals like John Calvin who would do away with all church hierarchy. Sansom’s hero, a lawyer born a hunchback, is among the reformers but loyal to the King. In the first of Sansom’s novels, Dissolution, Shardlake is tasked by the King’s most trusted advisor, Thomas Cromwell, to discover the murderer of one of the commissioners assigned to close down the Catholic monasteries and transfer their riches to the Crown. In the second, Dark Fire, Shardlake must solve more than one murder and try to keep Lord Cromwell from falling out of favor with the King. The third, Sovereign, and fourth, Revelation, follow a similar pattern. With each succeeding novel, Sansom manages to make his plots more involved and the danger to Shardlake more immediate. 

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Last week I saw a notice on the web that Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of the first book recommended by megacelebrity Oprah Winfrey to her millions of fans, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Like most people, I found my curiosity piqued by the sad tale of investments gone bad, and I certainly hope Mitchard and her family (which includes nine children) recover some of the money they’ve lost to a crooked investment manager.

But the story got me thinking: What kind of books does Oprah recommend, and would her reading list be of interest to anyone but a devotee of the billionaire talk show host turned philanthropist and dispenser of advice on just about everything?

Actually, I discovered that the list put together by Oprah – or the people advising her – is both eclectic in subject matter and (relatively) wide ranging in its historical sweep. Oprah began the “club” in 1996, selecting Mitchard’s recently released The Deep End of the Ocean as her first recommendation. Also recommended that year were Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (published in 1977) and Jane Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth (a 1989 release). Oprah’s list for 1997 contained eleven books, the most for any year; by contrast, her 2006 list included a single title, Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book about the Holocaust written shortly after World War II and first published in English in 1960. Even this cursory survey suggests that Oprah can hardly be accused of pandering to the soap-opera crowd that stays glued to the TV to soak in her feel-good stories every afternoon. 

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HarperCollins, 2010. $26.99 (cloth)

Reviewed By Larry Mazzeno

I have been planning to read something by Isabel Allende for years. Maybe because I was intrigued by the dust jacket blurbs on one of her novels that my wife picked up awhile back. Maybe because I knew she was the niece of Salvador Allende, former president of Chile who was assassinated in a military coup in 1973. This woman should have a wealth of information to share just by tapping into her personal life. Apparently she used these events to shape The House of Spirits (1982), a multigenerational novel about life and politics in Latin America. Allende lives in California now, but her interest in the region where she was raised continues to fuel her creative energies.

So when I saw Island Beneath the Sea on the library bookshelf last week, I decided ‘now’ was as good a time as any to get acquainted with Allende’s work. On the whole, I’m glad I did. Like its predecessors, this is a historical novel. The settings are Haiti and New Orleans in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. While the cast of characters is rather large, the principal focus is on the mulatta slave Zarité, who is bought by French plantation owner Toulouse Valmorain as a servant for his wife. Through Zarité’s eyes readers experience the brutalities of slavery, including the callous treatment of even “privileged” house workers. Zarité’s bed becomes a playground for her master, by whom she bears two children. We also learn about the heroics of a handful of rebels who eventually kick the French off the island. 

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I heard on the news last week that Jose Saramago had died. For those of you who – like me – are vaguely uncertain why you should know who this is, let me remind you: Saramago, a Portugese novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Hearing about Saramago’s death got me to thinking: Why is it that I, who claim to have some expertise in literary matters, know so little about Nobel Prize winners? Perhaps the answer is not as unusual as you might think, but it may say something about Americans’ reading habits.

Ask a well-read American to name the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize and you’re likely to see a blank stare. He or she might remember that William Faulkner won the prize, as did Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. Devotees of Oprah’s Book Club will tell you that Toni Morrison won the prize several years ago. But likely as not, only a handful of Americans, even those who read voraciously, can name anyone else—even other Americans.

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