Tigers in Red Weather, by Liza Klaussmann

 “The epitome of East Coast glamour, scene of vodka martinis and moonlit conspiracies, Tiger House is where the beautiful and the damned have always come to play,” reads the blurb for Tigers in Red Weather. When I first read this, it sounded glamourous, romantic even - I pictured that idyll of lounging in the summer sun, not a care in the world; the rich husband, the green expanse of lawn, the white painted boathouse. But reading it again, I can see what it really says, the clues it is giving as to what this book really contains - “moonlit conspiracies” and “the beautiful and the damned” jump out at me, and it sums the book up quite perfectly. I am naive and perhaps picked this book up thinking the wrong things, but ironically, this is exactly what the story inside gives away: what looks like glamour and perfection on the outside inevitably has a dark undercurrent running through it.

Set predominantly in the late fifties, Tigers shows a post-war society where women have a certain role they are expected to play: happy housewife and social entertainer. Told by the five main characters - firstly the women, Nick, her cousin Helena, Nick’s daughter Daisy, then the men, Nick’s husband Hughes and Helena’s son Ed, gradually piecing together an entirely different picture. A picture of unfulfilled matrimony, of frustrated histories, of secrets and hidden bitterness.

Its a gentle story, beginning in 1945 as Nick and Helena separate after wartime hardships to start their lives anew as married women, before jumping twelve years ahead for the reader to see where their lives have taken them. This is the summer of 1959 and they have all gathered at Tiger House. Daisy has her first crush and is bent on trouncing her sugary rival, Peaches, in the annual tennis championships, but things are turned upside down when she and Ed find a dead body, though it seems to have a bigger impact on the adults than it does on her. Hughes, after years of essentially ignoring his wife, suddenly finds he can’t resist her, but is he too late to win her back? Helena, demoralised and unhappy seems to be completely oblivious of everything going on around her, but is she really as ignorant and soft as she appears? And Ed. There is definitely something odd about that boy, but Hughes is the only one to see it - where will it lead and what will the consequences be?

Tigers greatly reminded me of Joanne Harris’ more recent work, her darker novels like Gentleman and Players. Everyone has a role that they must play and on the outside everything looks pristine. Its like that old saying about the duck: calm on the surface, but paddling like hell underneath. Ed hits the nail on the head on page 324: “I told you,” he [says], “no one says anything they really mean. None of it’s real.” At the end of the day, they are all pretending - saying one thing, when what they are really thinking, or what they wish they were really doing, is something quite entirely different. It makes the reader wonder how much you can ever really know another person.

I really enjoyed the book. Each character has a secret embedded within them, something that trails around behind them, a weight on their back, that they don’t want to admit to themselves let alone to those closest to them. It’s a very revealing experience to read. There is Hughes and his wartime affair. Nick and her love for a man who for years has responded to her only by pinning her into the housewife role she hates, rather than treating her as an equal in their marriage. Helena and her nasty, abusive husband; in her weakness, instead of turning against him, she turns against the only person who genuinely wants to help her. Daisy who cannot admit that her fiancee is her more interested in her mother than in her. And, again, Ed. Ed is the one who is closest to seeing it as it is, and even saying it as it is. But he has his own secrets. It is extremely clever of Klaussmann (who is, incidentally, the great great great granddaughter of Herman Melville) to leave his viewpoint until last - through everybody else’s stories, she leads us to our own conclusions regarding Ed’s role in the unravelling of Tiger House - but, even then, do things really play out quite like the reader thinks they do?

What at first appears to be light is shadowed by darkness. There are the trappings of the big house and the big summer party, but all is not as it seems. “If there’s one thing you can be sure of in this life,” Nick says, “It’s that you won’t always be kissing the right person.” But who is the right person? And how do you know? How long can you hide from yourself?

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

Bizarrely, and completely unintentionally, two of the books I recently read were overflowing with references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The connections between this classic and the first book are pretty obvious: Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn follows the author’s sea-bound adventures on the trail of 28,800 plastic bath toys that were lost overboard one stormy night on a routine trip across the ocean*. The link between Melville and the second book I read, though, were more unexpected.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is, essentially, a coming-of-age novel. Set in small-town, fairly privileged America, it follows five members of Westfield College through baseball season. The baseball team in question is called The Harpooners, a reference to the college director, Guert Affenlight, who, as a teenager, discovered that Herman Melville once visited and lectured at Westfield.

This is Harbach’s debut, a Waterstones 11 and Waterstones bookclub selection, and has been widely hailed as one of the best books of the year, with Harbach suffering comparisons to Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. The truth is, I never really understood the term ‘great American novel’ before reading Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I’ve never read Franzen, or Foster Wallace (or Moby-Dick, for that matter), but now it’s as if a little light has come on in my head; its almost as if the term was coined for this book. I can’t quite pinpoint what makes it great, what makes it American - other than the obvious, of course: the setting, the subject. It just oozes something inherently American-like that I can only assume comes simply as a result of the writer being a citizen of the country.

As much as I can’t define its American-ness, I also can’t quite define the actual content, suffice to say it’s good. Very good. It follows each of its five key characters as each goes through normal life type stuff: growing up, the search for happiness, for love; dealing with change. What happens when your dreams change? When everything that always came naturally, that you always believed in, gets flipped on its head? How do you cope with that, how does it change you, and how do you change it? These are the questions our characters are facing, and they face them head-on with, generally, aplomb.

One of the most interesting things I found about this book was Harbach’s approach to his story. It unfolds through the different characters’ eyes - Henry, the prodigal baseball player, who is suffering from a crisis of confidence; Schwartz, the team captain, with a troubled childhood and an uncertain future; Pella, President Affenlight’s lost daughter returned from an unhappy marriage, trying to find out who she is and where she belongs; and Affenlight himself, sixty and in love not only for the first time, but with a student. But then there is Owen.

Owen is as much a part of the book as any of the others, but we never see things from his perspective; all we know about him is what the others tell us. Beautiful, smart, popular, gay; from Owen much of the rest of the book unfolds. Was this a conscious choice on Harbach’s part, to not write Owen’s side of the story, to leave me wondering where he really fitted in, what he thought about the events surrounding him - or did Harbach not feel confident to write from Owen’s perspective (given, perhaps, Owen sexual orientation)? From a storytelling perspective, it’s intriguing because the reader never really gets to see Owen the way they see the other characters; I can never really discern his true feelings and motivations, particularly when it comes to his relationship with Guert - is Owen leading him on, is it just a fling or a bit of a game to take advantage of Guert’s obvious interest, or does he have genuine interest in Guert himself? Although I felt like I knew Owen, when I stopped to think about it, I realised that he’s actually a bit of an unknown quantity.

And Moby-Dick? Well, as I said, I’ve never read that one, so I don’t know whether it infuses The Art of Fielding in more ways than one. Despite never selling through the original print-run in Melville’s lifetime, the whale is now considered to be ‘a great American novel’. Is The Art of Fielding in the same league? Well, some of the storylines do work out rather conveniently, perhaps more so than such things would do if experienced in ‘real’ life, but that’s no different to a thousand other good books, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much had that not been the case. A satisfying ending, where all the strings come together is, after all, part of the joy of reading. Aristotle’s emotional carthasis and all that. Plus, I’m pretty sure that at this point its sold a chunk more than its first print-run, and made Harbach a few bob more than Moby-Dick made Melville.

To sum up The Art of Fielding, life-affirming is the word that springs to mind. Chad Harbach is definitely worth the hype.

(* I reviewed Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck briefly on my other blog, The Plastic Diaries, so won’t repeat that here)