Book Reviews

Chip Off the Old Block

Lawrence Block expanded Hit Man, a black comedy that turns the genre upside down, into the “Keller” series, five novels spaced over fifteen years. I had the pleasure of hearing the author read from the novel and talk about his craft.

Sixty fans have squeezed into Partners & Crime bookstore in Greenwich Village, a standing-room-only crowd gathered in the gloom of an early March evening to hear Lawrence Block read from his novel, Hit Man (William Morrow, 1998, 259 pp). Block, a grand master of the Mystery Writers of America, has written more than fifty books, including the celebrated series featuring his best-known character, ex-cop and recovering alcoholic Matt Scudder. “Block is one of the finest practitioners of his craft in America,” says John Douglas, a proprietor of Partners & Crime. “He weaves very cunning plots and possesses an inexhaustible imagination. And he manages to keep a lively eye peeled for the pertinent issues of the day.”  
        Mystery buffs often compare Block to classic noir authors who have transcended the genre. “He writes in the tradition that goes back to Raymond Chandler,” says Charles Raisch, editor of New Mystery magazine. “His characters are alienated men wrestling with moral issues—believable characters in trouble. Hundreds of authors try to do this, but few manage to pull it off. Block is damned good.”  
        The protagonist of Hit Man is a chip off the old Block. “Keller is an urban lonely guy,” says the author about his latest creation, “rather ordinary except for his profession.” Keller is a killer—a paid assassin, a murderer for hire—but prone to self-examination:

If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself.… Except that every once in a while he got a phone call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.

        Keller refers to himself as an “expediter,” a corporate troubleshooter. He knocks off a snitch accountant hiding out in Oregon, a couple of rival businessmen in Cincinnati, an uxoricidal husband in New Orleans. Meanwhile, he undergoes therapy with an equally baneful psychologist, adopts a dog and begins an affair with his dog sitter, takes up stamp collecting … just another workaday consultant.  
        Hit Man began as a series of short stories published in Playboy. “I realized I was writing a novel on an installment plan,” says Block. The book doesn’t feel as though it’s reworked material, although the chapters have a discreteness about them. Block’s “deadpan naturalness” holds the thing together. “Hit Man is very unsettling without the harrowing grue,” says Douglas of Partners & Crime. “The book has a moral ambiguity that reflects the cynical 1990s.” It is also wickedly amusing. Keller is forever wondering about other lives as he methodically goes about his business—garroting, poisoning, bludgeoning, shooting, smothering—making up stories about the strangers he encounters in the motels and restaurants he frequents on the road. Here he wonders where his waitress, who sports a diamond ring, will settle with her new husband:

Maybe a mobile home. You could buy one cheap, a nice double-wide, make a nice starter home for her and her fellow. Or maybe the best thing for them was to buy a duplex and rent out half, then rent out the other half when they were ready for something nicer for themselves. No time at all you’re in real estate, making a nice return, watching your holdings appreciate. No more waiting on tables for her, and pretty soon her husband could quit slaving at the lumber mill, quit worrying about layoffs when the industry hit one of its slumps.

        Keller, it turns out, is the Walter Mitty of Murder, Inc., and his penchant to fantasize gets him into some of the book’s more comedic situations. The professional killer constantly is conned by clients trying to buy his services cheap, including a Washington bureaucrat who convinces Keller to murder several people as an act of patriotism. Add into the mix the old man in White Plains, Keller’s boss, who shows early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, and the old man’s assistant, Dot, who compensates for her employer’s growing confusion by drumming up business with classifieds in Soldier of Fortune (“Odd Jobs Wanted. Removals a specialty. Write to Toxic Waste, PO Box 1149, Yonkers, NY”) and you get screwball noir.  
        Block is having great fun in Hit Man, brilliantly using the ordinariness of Keller even as Keller finds himself, often, in extraordinary circumstances. “You bet he’s operating at the height of his powers,” says Douglas, comparing Block to another artist whose name begins with a B. “He’s using his complete battery of skills, like Beethoven when he composed the late sonatas.” 
        Well, maybe. But one thing is certain. Hit Man will be a hit in the bookstores. Though the novel never really goes anywhere, it’s still a page turner—even though readers know right from the start who done it. 

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The Annotated Alice:
The Definitive Edition

Martin Garner publishes his definitive Annotated Alice, a delightful companion to elegant new editions
of Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass remain remarkably popular, judging by the hundreds of editions of the books in print—if you count Alice coloring books, playing cards, paper dolls, puzzles, musical scores and recordings (readings by Christopher Plummer, Cybill Shepherd, Lynn Redgrave), not to mention specialty items such as the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alice in Wonderland Book of Ornaments. Yet even Martin Gardner, one of the leading authorities on Lewis Carroll who has devoted six decades to exploring his life and work, admits that the Alice books are treasured today by adults, not adolescents. “The time is past when a child under fifteen, even in England, can read Alice with the same delight as gained from, say, The Wind in the Willows or The Wizard of Oz,” he writes in a preface to The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Norton, 2000, 340 pp). “Children today are bewildered and sometimes frightened by the nightmarish atmosphere of Alice’s dreams.” 
        Gardner, who for a quarter-century wrote the “Mathematical Games” column for Scientific American, has assembled the introductions and notes from two previous glosses on the Alice books to make the Definitive Edition. His original Annotated Alice has sold more than a half-million copies since it appeared in 1960; his More Annotated Alice presented further discoveries about Carroll’s puns, number games and sources for his doggerel. The Definitive Edition combines both glosses along with the text of “The Wasp in a Wig,” a suppressed episode of Through the Looking Glass. Gardner adds some new material as well, much of it in the form of curious observations sent to him through the years by fellow Carrollians, many of them members of the Lewis Carroll societies on both sides of the pond. The Definitive Edition also includes reproductions of John Tenniel’s original pencil sketches for the Alice illustrations.  
        Lewis Carroll was the pen name adopted by the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University. Dodgson, of course, was atypical of his fellow dons. For all his outward attention to convention—he was a fastidious dresser who wore gloves year-round—he had an adventurous mind and spirit. He also had many child friends. He idolized young girls (he disliked young boys) and spent much of his free time and creative energy devising ways of meeting and entertaining them. Although critics and psychoanalysts have speculated on his motives—sometimes comparing Lewis Carroll with Humbert Humbert, the pedophile narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—Dodgson seems to have been at all times a gentleman.  
“There is no indication that Carroll was conscious of anything but the purest innocence in his relations with little girls, nor is there a hint of impropriety in any of the fond recollections that dozens of them later wrote about him,” writes Gardner. “There was a tendency in Victorian England, reflected in the literature of the time, to idealize the beauty and virginal purity of little girls. No doubt this made it easier for Carroll to suppose that his fondness for them was on a high spiritual level, though of course this hardly is a sufficient explanation for that fondness.”  
        Dodgson was most fond of Alice Liddell, one of three daughters of the dean of Christ Church, and during the summers he would form boating parties consisting of himself, the sisters and their governess or another adult for lazy trips up and down the Thames. After one particularly successful excursion—on a hot July 4, 1862, “as memorable a day in the history of literature,” noted W.H. Auden, “as it is in American history”—ten-year-old Alice implored Dodgson to write out the day’s stories, an extravagant fantasy that began with its young heroine falling down a rabbit hole. Two years later, Dodgson delivered her request, making Alice a Christmas present of a green leather booklet containing the handwritten story he titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. He later revised and published the tale as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Dodgson never anticipated that this book and its sequel would become classics, translated into almost every language and repeatedly adapted for stage and film (the Definitive Edition includes a selected filmography that sadly neglects to mention a marvelous BBC production about the July 4 trip written by the late Dennis Potter). Indeed, it’s a testament to Dodgson’s talents that stories written for an audience of one would become, with a little tweaking, universally loved.  
        While readers can enjoy Alice’s adventures without knowing much about Dodgson or the real model for his heroine or the Victorian poems and songs he so deftly parodied, they will be delighted by Gardner’s glosses and his witty, often pointed asides. “No other books written for children are more in need of explication than the Alice books,” writes Gardner. “Much of their wit is interwoven with Victorian events and customs unfamiliar to American readers today, and even to readers in England. Many jokes in the books could be appreciated only by Oxford residents, and others were private jokes intended solely for Alice.”  
        Gardner notes generally fall into three categories: those that illuminate customs and conventions of Victorian England and other historical elements; those that parse long-standing debates among Carrollians; and those that celebrate Dodgson’s literary and numeracy cleverness, as well as the remarkable influence the Alice books have had on writers since their publication. We learn, for instance, that the White Rabbit mistakenly refers to Alice as “Mary Ann” because that name served as a British euphemism for “servant girl”; and that “Mary Ann” also was a slang term for the guillotine during the French Revolution. “It is probably coincidental that Carroll’s use of the name anticipates the obsession with beheading” of the Queen of Hearts.  
        Such digressions will strike some as tedious, as Gardner himself admits, at one point waggishly defending “the right of annotators to take off in any direction they like.” He needn’t be skittish about the matter. Gardner is an elegant writer, and some of his notes, as he points out, are intended as short essays—on Dodgson’s fascination with looking glasses, for example, or on his use of chess as a narrative device. Mostly, however, Gardner seems to be having great fun explicating the odd turns of Dodgson’s mind and quoting from his letters to his “child friends,” some of these letters as entertaining as the Alice books themselves.  
        Newly converted Carrollians may wish to supplement the Definitive Edition with another study guide to Wonderland. The Alice Companion (New York Univ., 1998, 331 pp) by Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone is a more earnest, and certainly more extensive, source book arranged alphabetically—that is, the authors expound on topics from “Acland” (a fellow Ox-ford don whose children may have served as the first audience for the “Mad Tea-Party” episode) to “Zoomorph” (illustrator Tenniel’s depictions of people as animals are examples of zoomorphs). Jones and Gladstone, like Gardner, have spent between them sixty years exploring Dodgson and his work and, also like Gardner, they are chary when it comes to psychoanalyzing their subject, preferring to focus on the politics, personalities and poetics of Oxford and London that bore on the Alice books. While Gardner addresses the matter of Tenniel’s models for the Ugly Dutchess, for example, Jones and Gladstone conjecture on whether Dodgson used this character to spoof biologist T.H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce, who bitterly debated evolution at Oxford in 1860. But Jones and Gladstone also write winsomely of Dodgson in entries such as “Friendship,” where they discuss his penchant for solitude. “Between Carroll and adult men and women, friendship is an elusive subject,” write the authors. “Carroll stammered, walked in an odd way, had a reputation as a recluse.… When he mixed with such lions as the Tennysons or Julia Margaret Cameron, Carroll could be spiky: either they looked upon him as potentially amusing but in no way their social equal and thereby hurt him, or they saw him as a strange animal, capable only of unequal love with child-friends.”  
        Of course, some readers might want to encounter Alice without interference from experts explicating arcane references. These noble purists have two excellent options, both boxed sets elegantly printed on quality stock and reasonably priced. One, published by Harcourt Brace at $34.95, features hand-colored renderings of Tenniel’s illustrations, billing itself as the first Through the Looking Glass with the original art in full color. The other, published by Morrow at $32, reproduces Tenniel’s drawings from engravings made from the artist’s rediscovered woodblocks—the familiar illustrations remarkably crisp and clear, especially those with fine detail, such as the White Knight.  
The illustrations in the Gardner book are reproduced reasonably well on its uncoated stock, but the joy of The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition lies in its verbal gloss—which is as it should be, for in the end it is Dodgson’s enduring imagination and gift for words that makes these charming stories worth reading after so many years.