Author Archives: Larry Franz

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

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Highsmith is the author of the Tom Ripley novels and also Strangers on a Train. This novel, published in 1952, is about a young woman working in a Manhattan department store who falls in love with a customer, an older woman who is rich and beautiful and going through a divorce. The two women start spending time together and eventually go on a very long road trip. They finally confess their feelings and begin an affair. But the older woman’s divorce interferes with their relationship.

The novel is suspenseful, especially since it isn’t clear whether they will have an affair or not. It isn’t clear until the final pages how the story will end. I became bored with the main character — the story is told from her perspective. She seemed less interesting, even annoying, as the novel progressed. But this portrayal of a relatively happy lesbian relationship was considered groundbreaking in the 1950s.  (2/28/11)

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

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A man finds a couple million dollars of drug money and is pursued by killers who want what he found. One of the killers is strangely philosophical to the point of being inhuman. A county sheriff investigates and eventually decides it’s time to retire. It’s not a happy story.

The book moves quickly. The Texas locale and dialog are wonderfully rendered. The sheriff’s words and thoughts are particularly well-done. Even so, the movie added something, especially the performances of Javier Bardem as the otherworldly psychopath and Tommy Lee Jones as the troubled sheriff (the actor grew up in that part of Texas). I’m going to see about reading more of McCarthy’s work.  (1/21/11)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

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Jean Brodie teaches at a private school for girls in Edinburgh before World War II. She selects her favorite girls for special attention, sharing her private life with them and exposing them to her distinctive ideas about life, art and politics. She is “a woman in her prime”. Her favorite students, “the Brodie set”, are the “creme de la creme”.

This is a short, entertaining novel. The best parts are the words spoken by Jean Brodie to her students, and the thoughts expressed by some of those students on mysterious subjects like “sexual intercourse”. The book was made into a good movie years ago. One difference between the book and the movie is that Jean Brodie is more attractive than Maggie Smith, the actress who portrayed her. This matters somewhat to the plot.  (1/19/11)

Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

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This is a novel about a white, middle-aged professor in South Africa who has an affair with a student and loses his job. He goes to live temporarily with his daughter on her small farm. They are robbed and assaulted by three black men. The political or sociological aspects of the story — gender relations in an academic setting, racial relations in modern South Africa — didn’t interest me very much. I did, however, identify with the professor. He’s a difficult character with an uncertain future. He doesn’t regret the affair, isn’t sure what to do with himself, doesn’t get along very well with his daughter. He seems very real.  (1/12/11)

Moral Clarity: a Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman

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Abraham did the right thing when he argued with God about God’s intention to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah (not when he agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac). By standing up for his ethical ideals in opposition to the demands of his religion, Abraham foreshadowed the values of the Enlightenment.

Neiman believes that we should adopt certain key Enlightenment values, in opposition to cultural trends on both the right and the left (but mostly the right). She focuses on happiness, reason, reverence and hope. She contends that Enlightenment thinkers understood the limitations of reason. They also realized that progress is not inevitable. But thinkers like Kant showed the way to a universalist morality that favors reason over tradition, knowledge over superstition, and hope over fear.  (12/26/10)