This is a concise, dry but meticulously researched story of Douglas’s “Magnificent Seven,” which are among the most important and elegant propeller planes ever built.

For those of you who are staying for my second sentence: great machines are great art. The DC-3, in its own way, is as well worth looking at as a Rembrandt, and has the added bonus of having invented modern commercial aviation. When it arrived in 1936, as a redesigned and expanded DC-2, it was the first plane in history that could actually make a profit carrying passengers. (Previously airlines supported themselves almost exclusively on US Mail and usually lost money anyway.) It could carry 21 passengers, which was a lot in those days, and could make it from New York to Chicago non-stop – a tremendous achievement. It cost an airline about 72 cents per mile flown to operate. And it was fantastically elegant – indeed, beautiful. One of the most beautiful machines of a century replete and overflowing with beautiful machinery.

Two years after its introduction, commercial passenger traffic in the US had more than doubled and the DC-3 was carrying 95 percent of it. Every major airline, scads of minor ones, and thirty foreign airlines were flying this plane.

The twin-engined DC-3 and it’s four-engined big brother, the DC-4, served in the Second World War by the thousands as troop transports and cargo planes (designated principally as the C-47 and C-54). A DC-4 was Roosevelt’s version of Air Force One. Churchill’s private plane was also a DC-4. The DC-3 and the DC-4 made possible the Berlin Airlift, flying 92 million miles and delivering almost 2 million tons of food and supplies to save the city from a Soviet-imposed starvation. These are important, pivotal machines.

The greatness of the DC-3 and DC-4 in commercial aviation, and their role in winning the war and securing the peace, were such that Douglas Aircraft never fully recovered. It was a literally staggering success. Douglas was so busy building its planes (especially during the war, when the government forbade them to devote any significant time to non-essential research and development) that other companies beat them to the future and Douglas never caught up. In 1943, Lockheed came out with the Constellation – also a superbly elegant plane – which could fly nonstop coast-to-coast. In 1958, Boeing launched the 707 and the jet age.

In 1967, Douglas merged with McDonnell. And in 1997, with the further collapse of a great American industry, McDonnell Douglas merged with its former rival, Boeing.

But the DC-3 remained the darling of small airlines and is still flown by a few outfits today, having outlived both the company that made it and nearly every plane that made it obsolete (there are more DC-3s flying today than Boeing 707s).

Even great designs rarely survive more than a few years; only something truly revolutionary, like the cross-strung grand piano or Browning’s semi-automatic pistol, make it for decades. The DC-3 just turned 79.

–

Manliness: 10/10

Plane-iness: 10/10

Narrativity: 3/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): Doesn’t really matter. You’re not likely to read it anyway, unless you want to be a 1930s airline pilot when you grow up. Which I do.

Douglas Propliners, by Arthur Pearcy. Airlife Publishing, Ltd, 1995. 160 pages.

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I’ve been angry with Irwin Shaw for about ten years, ever since I read “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” on account of a bad simile. He has the wife in the story suggest to her husband that they get “a steak as big as a blacksmith’s apron.” Nobody would say that. So I decided on a peevish impulse that Shaw was a rotten writer and turned my attention to Philip Roth (who, in retrospect, was merely the plaything of an idle and somewhat revolting hour).

A year ago, however, in a miserable little hotel in Frankfurt, a miserable and bleak little city – where my father and I were to visit Frank Schirrmacher for the last time – I was propped up on a square pillow reading James Salter’s wonderful memoir Burning the Days, in which he describes his relationship with Shaw. Shaw called Salter a “lyric” writer, whereas he (Shaw) was a narrative writer. This interesting dichotomy, combined with Salter’s sturdy devotion to Shaw and the discovery that Shaw was just as Jewish as Philip Roth, put Lucy Crown on my reading list.

I should have read it immediately. It is an extraordinary work. The writing is tight, the story tremendous, and Shaw’s psychological insight staggering. I recall scenes in this book with the vividity of an eyewitness. (In particular, the phonograph scene and the scene near the end with the brandy bottle at the crossroads – you’ll know them when you see them.)  Shaw does – though only rarely – get into dialogue trouble when he gives a character a speech that’s a little too long and too well-phrased. His finest moments are when he tells you what his characters are thinking. He is always exactly right. Every visit to the minds of his protagonists is rewarding.

Lucy Crown has a fine, strong finish, like a great bourbon or a late-season football game that doesn’t involve the Jets. I’m off to get all the Shaw I can put my hands on.

–

Engagingness: 9/10

Enjoyability: 9/10

Prose: 8/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 8.5/10

Lucy Crown by Irwin Shaw.  Random House, 1956.  339 pages.

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William L Shirer observed Hitler’s rise at first hand, living in and reporting from Berlin first as a newspaperman and then, for CBS, as one of the world’s first radio correspondents. His Berlin Diary, which he kept secretly from 1934 until he left Berlin at the end of 1940, is one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Rise and Fall is the complete history, to which Shirer devoted more than a decade of research. He lived through many of the events and knew many of the personalities – and he could read the captured archives and diaries in German, Italian and French. He saw Hitler at various party rallies and, once, on the street (walking by with a tic-riddled shambling shuffle on his way to the docks to inspect his yacht).

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. On February 27, the Reichstag was burned – by the Nazis, to justify emergency government powers. These were granted to Hitler on March 23, and he was thereafter absolute dictator. One of his first acts was a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. The next year he murdered nearly everyone who had known him in his younger days. In 1935, he disenfranchised the Jews. In 1936, he sent his troops into the Rhineland. (The German army had been ordered to beat a hasty retreat if opposed in any way – and France was authorized to oppose it, under the Locarno Pact, but she did nothing.)

In 1937, Hitler renounced the Versailles treaty. In March 1938, he annexed Austria. In September, the Munich Agreement destroyed the last chance the world had to bring down Hitler without a general war. In October, Germans marched into Sudeten Czechoslovakia; in early 1939, into Bohemia and Moravia. In September, Hitler invaded Poland and the war began.

By this time, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, and French Prime Minister Daladier and his execrable Foreign Minister Bonnet, collectively, through their arrogant ignorance, had bargained away the freedom of millions of people in other lands and succeeded not in preventing the war, but in making its final arrival so terrible that it destroyed them all, and very nearly destroyed the entire free world.

So a principal lesson is that men with basically good intentions but no understanding are extraordinarily dangerous. Churchill suggested calling the Second World War “The Unnecessary War” – because without the foolishness of these well-meaning men, and the others who watched Hitler metastasize during the 30s, the war need never have happened.

–

Engagingness: 9/10

Prose: 8/10

Importance: 9.5/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 8.5/10

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L Shirer.  Simon and Schuster, 1960.  1245 pages.

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Pale Fire is the most fascinating novel of the 20^th century. Maybe. I get into trouble when I say things like that. And I haven’t read as much as I ought. But Pale Fire is work of genius unlike any I’ve encountered. The book is a mystery – not the story, but the book itself. Its interpretation and the central question of the narrator’s true identity – and how much of what he says is true – has been the subject of fierce and largely pointless debate: Nabokov later explained the situation, but that hasn’t stopped a number of critics from claiming he misunderstood his own work & coming up with alternate readings.

Critics aren’t even sure how the book should be read ordinally – that is, in what order the pages should be consumed. This interesting and amusing question is a result of the book’s structure – the novel is contained in the endnote commentary on a substantial poem, supposedly the final work of a Robert Frostian poet named John Shade. The commentary, as well as a forward preceding the poem and a full index following the commentary, are the work of a madman college professor who, by a bizarre string of events, secured the right to edit and publish the poem. He believes himself to be the deposed King of a distant (eastern Scandinavian?) land called Zembla, and uses his notes on Shade’s poem to tell the story of his own overthrow and escape to America, which he believes is what the poem should actually have been written about.

Interwoven with the King’s story is another narrative about the man sent from Zembla to assassinate him. (The King now lives under a pseudonym teaching at a New England university and living next door to Shade.) The assassin crashes into the world of the poem itself on the day Shade finishes its last line but one, and murders not the King but Shade. The police report to the effect that the murderer had escaped from a nearby institute for the criminally insane and had come to kill the judge who put him there, for whom he mistook Shade, the “King” narrator dismisses as a malicious fabrication.

Nabokov writes a maniacally thorough picture of Zembla (which may or may not be “real” in the frame of the novel – the reader is left to work this out). Zembla has its own language, genealogy, geography and history. This isn’t unusual for a semi-fantastic novel – but the depth of the fiction is. Each name, phrase and linguistic conjuration is saturated with multiple meanings and playful allusion; each has its place in the story, in the larger fictitious world beyond the story, and in the actual world of literature beyond Nabokov’s book. The construction is ferociously, demonically intricate. A knowledge of Russian and French, and of literature and poetry – especially Joyce, Pope and Shakespeare – will come in handy. (The Library of America edition includes helpful endnotes of its own, but these are hardly complete.) As it is, I can only skim the surface. But I have a sense of having glimpsed something extraordinary, almost superhuman.

Enjoyability: 10/10

Engagingness: 10/10

Prose: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 10/10

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. First published 1962, 224 pages.  This edition, Library of America, 1996.

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I recently read these novels for the third time each, and the results are surprising: The Information is generally regarded as Martin Amis’s finest work, but it’s not as good as it was the first time I read it. Lionel Asbo was badly reviewed, which is to say the reviewers did a bad job (the NY Times’ review by Kathryn Harrison may be the most incompetent, elementary-school review I’ve ever read on any book). Lionel Asbo supposedly falls back on recycled characters and shows that Amis is slipping, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was even better on the second reading, and, on the third, I had a right old whale of a time.

I think many reviewers stopped reading (or stopped paying attention) after the first three or four pages of Lionel Asbo. These are indeed quite repulsive and I was immediately worried, on the first encounter, that the book would be an unreadably pornographic disaster. But it doesn’t take much further reading to find out that your first impression is totally wrong. In retrospect, hilariously wrong.

Nabokov once explained that, “curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it.” What he means is that, on the first reading, you’re too busy figuring out what the book is about and how it’s structured to get the most out of it. As with an old friend, the first meeting may be something special, but the quality of the time you spend with your friend changes fundamentally once you get to know him. Imagine going through life never meeting any person more than once.

Nabokov was probably the greatest novelist of the 20^th century, and almost certainly the greatest stylist. English has more words in it than any other language, has the most possibilities, is the hardest to dominate. But Nabokov did dominate it – even though he called his English “patball to Joyce’s championship game.” Amis has a similar relation to Nabokov – or you could think of him as Egon Schiele to Nabokov’s Klimt. He hasn’t got Nabokov’s spiritual depth. He does have an absolutely crushing technique. His imagery is original and often astonishing – and since art is the job of finding new analogies, Amis ranks among the greatest artists living. His style so enchants the more perceptive reviewers that they can’t help trying to imitate him in their reviews. But when they dip into their haversacks for an Amisean expression they come up empty.

You should read The Information and Lionel Asbo. Ideally, you should read them a few times. The opening paragraph of The Informtation deserves to be learned by heart and recited like poetry. (“Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them….”) And the thing that makes Lionel Asbo so funny, readable and rereadable, was the weakest part of The Information – the criminal character. From The Information’s semi-developed “Scozzy” blossomed the fully-rounded and wonderfully misshapen Lionel, whom I shall enjoy encountering again and again.

–

The Information:

Enjoyability: 8.5/10

Engagingness: 8/10

Prose: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Lionel Asbo: State of England:

Enjoyability: 9/10

Engagingness: 9/10

Prose: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

The Information, by Martin Amis.  Flamingo (HarperCollins), 1995.  494 pages.

Lionel Asbo: State of England, by Martin Amis. Knopf, 2012, 255 pages.

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Anthony Trollope is one of history’s most lovable (and therefore least Ayn-Randish) novelists, though he’s often slandered as a second-rate Jane Austen. The chief complaint against his work seems to be that there is too much of it – that anyone who could produce 47 novels while simultaneously earning his living as one of Her Majesty’s Post Office Inspectors couldn’t have taken writing terribly seriously. Critics find his tremendous natural facility rather annoying.

The other great complaint against Trollope is often lodged against Miss Austen as well – he’s just too enjoyable. His books are too charming. You’ll have too good a time, especially if the romance works out in the end, which it often does. You’ll be sorry when the book is over and you’ll wish you could read what happens to the characters later in life. Apparently, this is unacceptable. You’re supposed to finish a novel with the gained knowledge that life never ever works out and a bad migraine.

Trollope belongs to a small category of writers who are so entertaining, so witty and so charming that their work is practically medicinal (EB White is another such). I first read Doctor Thorne to help me over a bad cold and it was better than chicken soup or Zicam. This was my second reading, and Doctor Thorne stands up as my favorite of the dozen or so Trollope novels I’ve read (most of which are brilliant).

When you’ve finished this book, you’ll wish the story would continue. And, in a manner, it does: This is the third of six “Barsetshire Novels,” a series which displays Trollope’s unsurpassed ability to invent not just stories but entire living, teeming worlds: Each novel in the series chronicles the residents of a fictional county (Barsetshire) and the main characters of one novel float delightfully in and out of the others as their histories overlap. Trollope builds the county, its towns and countrysides in startling detail; he creates hundreds of real personalities and holds them all in his mind as each moves around from day to day, doing what he would ordinarily do, getting on with his life. Trollope could have gotten fifty good novels out of Barestshire. We’ll have to be satisfied with six.

Doctor Thorne is the perfect introduction to Trollope (the order in which you consume the series doesn’t matter, and each novel stands by itself). Should you ever feel exhausted by the cynicism and relentless drive of city living, this is your escape into greener pastures.

Enjoyability: 10/10

Engagingness: 8/10

Prose: 7/10

Cynicism: 1/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope.  First published 1858.  This edition, Oxford University Press, 1989.  639 pages.

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The story of the Second World War, as told by my high school, took about ten textbook pages and fifteen minutes and went like this: “American farmers, internment of Japanese Americans, Holocaust, Atomic Bomb.” This is hardly a complete picture. So bring up the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – the IMTFE – and we’ll have no idea what you’re talking about. Arnold C. Brackman, who covered the trial for the United Press through most of its 1946-48 lifespan, spent the subsequent twenty-five years researching and writing what remains the only serious attempt to document the whole process. He writes in his introduction:

“Some people dimly recall a handful of Japanese atrocities during World War II: the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the POWs and other slave laborers building the Siam-Burma Death Railway, including the bridge over the River Kwai. But who remembers the mass murder or 18,000 Filipino men, women and children in the town of Lipa? Or the murder of 450 French and Vietnamese POWs at Langson, Vietnam, where the Japanese first machine-gunned them in the legs and then dispatched the squirming targets in a bayonet drill?”

This book is history we should know – the military usurpation of the Japanese government in the 20s and 30s through intimidation and murder, the racist Japanese supremacy of the State Shinto, the policy of world conquest that took its first belligerent steps on foreign soil with the unprovoked invasion of China in 1931. (For an extraordinarily succinct summary of Japanese war aims, see Morison’s brilliant Two-Ocean War, p. 41.)

Steeped in ignorance of the details of the war, there is an increasing & dangerous tendency to say that all sides were equally bad, or that we weren’t really fighting for anything in particular, or that we would have won no matter what or that it wouldn’t really matter if we’d lost. This book is concerned with the trial itself, and is far from an attempt to document Japan’s war crimes thoroughly – that would take a dozen volumes. But it will give you a basic idea of how the war started (and ended) and, most important, of the bestial, sub-human, sub-animal brutality of the Japanese army during the war.  You may dimly recall the Rape of Nanking, but you may not be able to picture the Japanese army moving into an undefended city still half-a-million strong and murdering a quarter million – half the remaining population – in only six weeks. And raping and gang raping the women of Nanking at the rate of just over 1000 per day. The attitude of the murderers in court after the war was also strikingly and worrying different from the prevailing attitude in Nuremburg.

I’ve attempted over the last few years to learn thoroughly the history of the Second World War and the events that lead up to it in both theaters; I have a long way to go. This book isn’t a vital introductory text (I plan to review some suggestions in that line soon) but it is mandatory reading if you are in search of a broader understanding of the events that split the twentieth century in half.

Engagingness: 7/10

Prose: 6/10

Material Importance: 8/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 7.5/10

The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, by Arnold C. Brackman.  William Morrow & Co, Inc, 1987.  432 pages.

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Summertime was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2009. The rumor is that it didn’t win because Coetzee was already the first author to win the prize twice and three times would have been overdoing it. Coetzee also has a Nobel Prize in literature.

At first glance this seems odd, because Coetzee is singularly humorless and as bleak as an East German police station. He is a South African who grew up during apartheid (and always hated it) and most of his fiction is heavily autobiographical. Summertime is so autobiographical, in fact, that the main character is an author named JM Coetzee who lived where the real Coetzee lived and has done a lot of what the real Coetzee did. It’s hard to say how much of this book is actually fiction. The only thing that was obviously changed from real life is a detail: the JM Coetzee in the novel is dead.

Summertime is framed as a series of interviews conducted by a biographer of the fictional Coetzee. The interviewer talks to a cousin of Coetzee’s, an English professor colleague, and three girlfriends who never really became girlfriends because Coetzee was so intensely introverted, unromantic, uncomfortable, tactless and, frankly, pathetic.

The South Africa Coetzee describes is as bleak as himself – dilapidated, run-down and sepia-toned – and it’s clear that nobody in his right mind would want to live there. Coetzee (in the novel at least) was not in his right mind and fell in love with what the other characters regard as one of the least lovable places on the planet. And the characters are themselves hardly more positive about Coetzee – they can’t help it, they don’t have anything against him, there just isn’t much good to say.

Summertime isn’t quite as depressing as the other Coetzee novel I’ve read – Disgrace – principally because the narrator in Disgrace ends up spending his days incinerating dead dogs. Unfortunately – I say “unfortunately” because Coetzee is powerful but not enjoyable – Summertime is a fine novel and worth reading. The prose is tight, solid and spare, like 18^th century Dutch furniture. Coetzee doesn’t have the English language by the throat the way Martin Amis does – he doesn’t have the imagery – but he does have the most solid craftsmanship in an English sentence to be found in modern literature. His psychological acuity is extraordinary; his self-awareness is total and ruthless. He so completely understands his own faults, together with how others perceive them, that Summertime has a strongly self-flagellistic undercurrent. I developed a slight contempt for the author’s failure as a human, which is how the interviewed characters seem to feel too.

Enjoyability: 5/10

Engagingness: 7/10

Prose: 9/10

Bleakness: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 7/10

Summertime, by JM Coetzee.  Viking Press, 2009.  266 pages.

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A lot of New Yorkers are too busy to read books.  Or maybe you only have time for books that promise a good return on the investment — self improvement manuals, healthy living and how-tos and so forth.  Plus the thirty-two thousand six-hundred and seventeen million websites you check every day to stay on top of things at work.

Classic non-fiction — history and essays — might be great for the weekend.  But you’ll probably be drunk or unconscious by then.

Novels are a pure indulgence — a Reese’s Peanutbutter Cup in our gluten-free yoga-crazed world.

So here’s the deal:  I hate yoga.  I read a little bit of everything, and I read pretty much all the time.  You can see what I’m working on at the top of the sidebar.  Every time I finish something, I’ll tell you what was in it.  And I’ll keep it short, because you’re in a hurry.

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