The joys of re-reading - favorite novels - Good Old Books, part 1 - Bibliography

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by Florence King

The O. Henry - like twist here is the blissful marriage of this mismatched pair. Under normal conditions they would grow to hate each other, but their strange modus vivendi inadvertently keeps the dew on the rose.

Claude lives with Maggie in Brooklyn during the cold months and takes off as soon as the weather turns warm. She doesn't know where he goes but he always comes back, and when he does it's like a honeymoon again. They go on like this for years, until Claude finds what he's looking for, and the provincial Maggie, her vistas expanded by their unconventional life, is able at last to understand him.

Sisterhood eludes feminist novelists, but it fairly leaps off the pages of Gwen Bristow's Jubilee Trail (1950), a good girl/bad girl western in which the male characters are all satellites.

Garnet Cameron of Washington Square, a privileged daughter of Old Knickerbocker society who won the politeness medal at finishing school, and Florinda Grove, a dancehall girl on the lam from a murder rap, are members of a covered wagon train headed for California.

Garnet soon loses confidence in her handsome but weak young bridegroom and turns to Florinda for companionship. Together they do men's work -- shooting, dressing game, building fires, reading Indian prints, and fighting off the savage hordes. When Garnet takes an arrow in the shoulder, Florinda helps in the cauterization even though she has a terror of fire and hideously burned hands from a mysterious incident in her past. Each crisis they meet together increases their mutual admiration. They learn to take pride in their strength, both moral and physical, especially the ladylike Garnet, who can't help gloating, "The men I used to dance with -- I could break them in two."

Much, much more happens -- Garnet's husband is murdered, she and Florinda open a saloon, etc. -- but her ultimate liberated moment comes when she contemplates her cauterized wound: "She was going to be proud of that scar when she got back to New York. She was glad she had been wounded in the arm, instead of some unmentionable spot that she could not boast about."

Henry Morton Robinson touches on partial-birth abortion in The Cardinal (1950), except that it's called a "craniotomy" and involves crushing the skull while the entire baby is still in the womb.

Father Stephen Fermoyle's brother-in-law is a Catholic doctor who loses his hard-won residency at a Protestant hospital when he refuses to perform the operation. Later on, when Steve's erring sister Monica is taken in labor to the same hospital, he must decide whether to let them kill the baby to save her life. He cannot, and gives her the last rites as the baby is born.

The Cardinal opens in 1915 and traces Steve's rise from Boston parish priest to prince of the church. My favorite parts are the behind-the scenes accounts of how the Vatican works, and the descriptions of the Roman contessa's salon: a hierarchy of ecclesiastical guests, their rank denoted by the colors of their flowing capes and birettas (the book answers all the Protestant questions about vestments), soignee women kissing rings, learned Jesuits swapping bons mots, and Cardinal Merry del Val capping quotations from Horace while juggling oranges. That's what I call a party. It's enough to make me religious.