Dear readers,
There’s a movie house here in New York that, on Sundays, shows a series of revivals appropriate for kids, complete with booster seats. My 5-year-old and I go often, and, a few months ago, went to see the 1944 musical “Meet Me in St. Louis.” We were having a lovely time watching the Technicolor evocation of 1903 St. Louis, and Judy Garland asking us to meet her at the fair and pining for the boy next door, when an old man in the row behind us hissed, loudly, “JUMP HIS BONES!” He continued to repeat this exhortation whenever the teenage characters of Esther and John Truett had a scene together. The kids in attendance seemed confused, but mercifully uncomprehending.
I came home bursting with our adventures, but also eager to reread the Sally Benson book on which the musical was based. And, accordingly, next time I had access to my boxes at my parents’ house, I dug out my paperback.
—Sadie
Benson was known as a short story writer; both this book and her collection “Junior Miss” were composed mostly of stories she’d published in The New Yorker. Originally, the semi-autobiographical sketches gathered here — about growing up in a large St. Louis family — appeared between 1941 and 1942, as a series she called “5135 Kensington.” But by the time the book was published, the MGM adaptation was already underway, and Benson changed her title to match theirs. She also added four new vignettes, and structured the book as a year in the life of the Smith family.
Much of this revolves around the in-jokes and antics and rivalries and loyalties of the children: the college man, Lon; Rose, the belle; Esther, her boy-crazy acolyte; contrarian Agnes and the morbid-minded 5-year-old, Tootie. Benson is an expert at the deft establishing sketch. In the book’s first chapter, (“June, 1903”) we meet the whole family via Rose’s new beau, John Shepherd. Mr. Smith is forbearing and unimpressed; his wife has the dressmaker rush a new dress.
There’s quite a lot of light-touch poignancy, too — financial worries and small heartaches that don’t make it into Vincente Minnelli’s film, and the truly touching relationships between Grandpa and the younger children. This is Benson’s love letter to her childhood and a vanished time, but it’s also smart, sharp and funny. I realized, when I put the book down, that my face actually ached from smiling. I think that’s worth sharing, don’t you?
Read if you like: The musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” of course; “Life Among the Savages,” by Shirley Jackson; the Betsy-Tacy high school books.
Available from: Any number of used book sites. It’s out of print, but was a best seller in its day. (My Bantam copy is from 1958.)
“The Tokyo Zodiac Murders,” by Soji Shimada
Fiction, 1981 (in Japanese); 2004 (in English translation)
I have long wanted to recommend this debut mystery novel by a prolific master, but have been unsure how best to hint at its intricacies without spoiling not just the twists but the book’s pleasures. It helps if you are already familiar with the Japanese subgenre of “honkaku,” which is characterized by puzzles — the more complex and ingenious the better — in which the reader is given all the clues to solve the crime.
“The Tokyo Zodiac Murders” also has a lot of fun with the convention of the locked-room mystery, as well as paper-chase motifs, stories wthin stories, enigmatic wills and astrology. In 1936, an artist, at work on a series about the zodiac, is found murdered in his locked studio. When his journals — or is it a short story? — are discovered, they reveal a disturbing plan to build his ideal woman from the body parts of family members, seven of whom later turn up dead and dismembered.
Jump 40 years ahead; Kazumi Ishioka, illustrator and mystery fanatic, is handed a valuable (and, needless to say, complicated) new clue to the killings that will implicate the police, send Ishioka across Japan, and involve a great deal of astrology into the bargain. I will quote the author Anthony Horowitz, whose blurb appears on the cover of my edition: “The solution is one of the most original that I’ve ever read.” I’ll second that, but I’d add that the process of reading really is the pleasure here. Whether you’re attempting to solve the case yourself (I didn’t) or just immersing yourself in a true distraction, this will carry you across the ocean, amiably fill a week’s vacation or sweep you away for a few hours before bed.
Read if you like: Honkaku, Sherlock Holmes, puzzles, astrology.
Available from: Pushkin Press.
Why don’t you …
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Go to the library? The Morgan Library’s exhibition “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” is a fantastic collection of the literary legend (and J.P. Morgan’s right-hand woman) Greene’s acquisitions and times. Greene, the daughter of the first Black graduate of Harvard College, spent most of her professional career “passing” as white, running Morgan’s collection and endowment for years after his death. The Morgan’s online shows are always a wonderful substitute for an in-person visit, or a supplement for those who can’t get enough. Check out the page of annotated Balzac, complete with doodles.
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Speaking of Balzac … have you read Henry James’s literary criticism, a collection of which was recently issued by NYRB? “The Lessons of Balzac” is a paean to the French realists, but even the young author comes in for a few digs — as do George Eliot (“Romola” is marred “by an excess of analysis”) and Thomas Hardy (who “has gone astray very cleverly, and his superficial novel is a really curious imitation of something better”) and “Our Mutual Friend,” “the poorest of Mr. Dickens’s works.” As Michael Gorra opens his estimable introduction: “The nerve he had.”
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Stir dull roots? As a child, I listened to T.S. Eliot on vinyl a lot. It’s the only way to see in the cruelest month.
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