I gave it up once. This time, taking a patient approach, I read from November and finished by the end of the year. The chapters are short, so you can get a few in during the myriad commercials courtesy of the NFL or on trips to the “library” down the hall. At some points the narrative kept me engaged late in the evenings for hours straight. It’s not a fast read by any means, but it is easier to read than War and Peace (something I may never finish). The chapters clip right along and things drag only at the end, in my opinion, after Anna’s fateful day.

Notes & Observations:

As for format, the Modern Library edition (left) proved a good choice. The translation is by Constance Garnett, certainly not the latest, but it’s pleasant, consistent, and has no tricks forcing the language to be over-contemporary. Any footnotes are conveniently included on the same page where a symbol is placed.

Unlike War and Peace, there’s little difficulty remembering who’s who. The major figures are more distinctly drawn. And more empathetic. Basically, the book jumps back and forth between three sets of lovers:  Stepan and Darya, Levin and Kitty, and Vronosky/Aleksey and Anna.  It offers a a contrast between love with abandon (Anna and Vronosky) and traditional hung-up love (Levin and Kitty) and honor (Aleksey).  Russian love can get so all-absorbing and maddening that it’s fatal to some of the cast. It is a subject Tolstoy knew well and wrote about prolifically.

As one of the commenting authors in the afterword section says, Anna K is a novel of manners, or a novel of society. Plot is secondary to the display of characters and their behavior within the milieu of social class structure. 

It’s an instructive book for writers. Tolstoy was at his best here, and could write equally well in any scene, about hunting, farming, politics, or courting. He can surprise us too, when in the midst of his straight-forward functional narrative he throws in some sort of colorful bonus section.  In War and Peace, I was taken unexpectedly by the frank revelations and level of detail in the chapter in which Pierre joins the Masons.  As an example in Anna K, the author gives us an amusing account of Stepan’s journeys and adventures with a visiting Prince, who he is charged with entertaining. Among their late night adventures they reportedly go to a sex show in which “Russian prowess” is displayed. Meanwhile, the landholder and stifled lover Levin works off his frustration when he goes on a grass-mowing binge, swinging a scythe out there with the serfs for three chapters.

The episodes are short and they go on and on like endless cars attached in a long train. The action is greatest within the characters’ hearts and souls, where changes are always happening. It’s deceptively simple, how we read this and get it. But it’s highly artful and a technical magic act on Tolstoy’s part.

We’re back on the familiar Busted Flush where a once-pretty and now bedraggled woman in distress visits Travis McGee to launch the storyline. By midbook, the houseboat is in need of patching up and so is our hero. After some sleepy early chapters of investigative type stuff, all hell breaks loose in one surprise paragraph. In between the action MacDonald enables McGee to give us all sorts of affirmations large and small about everyday life in America. Sometimes he drops a topical allusion to ID the timeframe of the story. Example: his 1970s Marantz stereo.

Travis McGee’s brainy friend Meyer has a more visible role as consiglieri, as well as fellow middle-aged exercise buff, gin drinker and panelist during long discussions of American issues. The soapbox dialog of Travis and Meyers (and others) sometimes sounds forced and wooden; for example these lines to a woman who’s visiting the boat:

“Joanna, I don’t know. A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging…”

It goes on for quite a while like that. I wished MacDonald had added a line showing the girl’s eyes spin.

Some of that sort of rhetoric is best left in McGee’s interior monologue, as in the instance when he gives a brief and poignant opinion of how damn little the world cares when we are temporarily knocked out of the picture. Or are gone for good. It’s a succinct mini-essay fine as is, and it would sound, well – dreadful – if misplaced into dialog.

There are a couple more unread McGee’s on the shelf for sometime this summer. They’re good escapist fiction and sure beat what’s on cable.

Vague memories of a Matt Helm movie as played by Dean Martin or some square-jawed male star from the Sixties. If I recall, the film was sexist and dimwitted. Maybe my memory fails. Maybe it was a TV thing, not sure.

Hamilton’s books are sure to be better.

Donald Hamilton was a good writer. A journeyman and a pro. A WWII vet. Started his paperback writing with Westerns, as did Elmore Leonard.

This novel in the Helm series (often recommended as the best one) doesn’t exactly start with a sizzling pace. Several chapters in, everyone is still hanging around the same dinner party that began the book.  The narrative voice is first person repetitive, sometimes overstated.  It came with the times. Back then, commercial writers made sure everyone got it.

But as the beginning dragged on, I wondered: Have things always been so damned exciting in New Mexico?

Not all is torpid. The descriptions of the “secret organization” are entertaining. You know, that secret organization to which Helm and the pretty gal in the black dress at the party are committed. This is the pretty gal who he just happens to encounter after all those years and who he had big espionage adventures and a roll in the hay with and who now taunts him with her beauty and darting eyes right in front of his wife.  And there are engaging scenes between man and wife. One notable moment occurs when the narrator’s description of how, in general, a lady always looks better after a party when she’s a bit worn out. This is about the extent of the suspenseful action in the opening fifty pages — until a woman (the citizen we assume) is found dead in Helms’ place, and he is set up. 

“It’s right up your alley,” the pretty coworker said when she gave me a book, twenty years ago.

What color it was I don’t recall; it wasn’t the deep blue one shown here- maybe it was lime green or yellow. I do remember that the author was John D. MacDonald, and it was a Florida book, mainstream variety. It sat in my bookcase a few years and eventually found its way into the donation bag, unread. My mistake.

After the recent rigor of reading “The Flame Throwers” and other literati books, this is now the reading summer that includes so-called Middle-Grade fiction. Within that is the school of the Hardboiled. I chose Travis McGee as my first hero to read. He’s not a cop and not a private eye nor secret agent. He’s a “salvage consultant,” after the money and the adventure.

I started with first novel of the series. There’s a ton of great stuff, informal real world stuff packed inside, a fair share of it artful description by Trav about himself. The stuff is woven into a simple story of increasing tension featuring one helluva bad guy named Junior Allen. There are Lauderdale dock hounds and various hucksters and drunks. And girls and women. Plenty of women, from South Florida tourist girl bimbos, to yacht candy gals, to a sensible wise friend and dancer type, to victimized trailer park honeys, burger joint waitresses, alkies, and beyond.

The most important female in the book , as it turns out, is Patty Devlan, the young innocente who McGee saves, rescuing her with her virtue in tact. But this is not the girl he gets. She’s way too young. She is solely representative of his moral imperative. He was falling for another one, and she…well, that would tell too much.

McGee is an opinionated narrator, often buttressing his descriptions of people and actions with micro-essays about macro topics. The guy could really use space. He could tell a thousand words in a few hundred. MacDonald wraps in trips to the Texas Rio Valley and to New York, both of which would induce chapters of considerable length from us mortal writers. But MacDonald can give us the Rio Valley in two pages or so. We’re there. He became my kindred spirit. I’ve been to that area and tried to write it numerous times. His depiction is brief, redolent and spot-on.

The novel runs about 300 pages and is loaded with terrific writing. Of the pulp authors I’ve read (and I admire Chandler most) MacDonald’s the consummate professional writer and the most honest one. A detail guy, and an astute observer.

As of last week there’s a bottle of Boodles Gin on the bar table. I’m going to read a few more McGee’s before the summer’s over.  If I had only paid attention to my friend at work…