Quotable Bits in the Penny Press!

A laurel and hardy handshake to the London Review of Books, which turned thirty years old this month with a lavishly overstocked issue of reviews and commentary, including a surprisingly enjoyable review by Colm Toibin of the new John Cheever biography. Not surprising because it deals with Cheever (whose work I mostly dislike), but surprising because it's written by Toibin (whose novels I entirely dislike) - providing yet more evidence of a literary phenomenon I'm tempted to dub the Zadie Smith Syndrome, in which a generally overpraised, talentless novelist shows first-rate skills as a book reviewer. I keep reading Toibin's deplorably lazy novels based entirely on the strength of the non-fiction stuff he's done that pleased me (including the epic, indispensable Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, which I'll get to one of these fine days here at Stevereads), so 2009's been the old one-two punch: a wretched novel, and this delightful Cheever piece.

The review is of the book by Blake Bailey, and it's a classic 'fulcrum' work - not well-written or otherwise intrinsically worthwhile, but irresistible to a wide swath of reviewers who don't want to review the book so much as use it to talk about the book's subject (not at all a despicable aim, although the shadow-ground it occupies between essay and review has never been fully charted). The LRB gives Toibin a nice generous amount of space, and his article is never less than fascinating. Here are some of the highlights, like this bit about Cheever's male lovers - and his weird belief that sexual activity sharpened his eyesight:

Since Cheever took the view that sexual stimulation could improve his eyesight, part of Max's function, once their affair began, was to offer the same comfort as a good pair of spectacles might have.

Or, after discussing Cheever's intensely strange novel Falconer ("The sense of violence, hatred, pain and deep alienation is offered raw; beside this, love, or something like love, comes as dark redemption or another form of power. In the middle of somewhere are the grim ordinariness of prison life and some brilliant sex scenes") this great little tossed-off line:

If you ignore the upbeat, cheesy ending, Falconer is the best Russian novel in the English language.

Hee.

Or this, culled from Cheever's journals (which Knopf paid a whopping 1.2 million dollars for the right to publish):

In the next entry, he ends with a remark which is one of the few endearing remarks in his journals and should be the motto of every writer alive: "All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June."

Now I'm not saying we've got the Miracle of Lourdes going on here - Toibin's singularly un-Irish tin ear for prose is still occasionally on display (that weak ending "might have," for instance, or those ploddingly repeated "remark"s) - but this is generally excellent stuff, as have been all of Zadie Smith's literary essays in the last year. A piece like this makes me eager to see more of Toibin's work - which is certainly an odd feeling.

Noah's Ark!

Our book today is from 1977: Peter Spier's incredible Caldecott Medal-winning picture book Noah's Ark. Since we've already covered at great length (indeed, is there any other kind of length?) here at Stevereads all the ways in which the very best so-called children's literature stands exactly equal with all other kinds of literature (and therefore needs no specialized pleading in order to appear here at all), we can skip right ahead to the book itself, which will almost certainly go down in Stevereads history as the least text ever to get reviewed here. Noah's Ark starts off (oddly - very, very oddly) with a fun little ditty about the ark written by the intensely hateful Dutch God-botherer Jacobus Revius ("Climb on board,/Said the Lord" etc.), but after that single page, the entire book has only two lines in it, one at the very beginning and one at the very end.

The one at the beginning is "...But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord" and comes before everything else in the book - before the title page, before the copyright information- a two-page spread juxtaposing the peace and bounty of Noah's home and farm with the warfare and bloodshed into which the rest of the world has descended.

After that, it's just page after page of Spier's incredibly detailed, deceptively brilliant pictures. We see the great ark being built (with a steadily-growing crowd of curious onlookers in the background), we see Noah and his simple, toiling family, and of course we see great crowds of animals, animals of every size and shape and description. Noah invites on board pigs and mice and bees and snails and butterflies. Sloths cling to the bellies of elephants, possums hang upside-down from the fur of camels, inchworms inch along (there's even a hopeful pair of dodos).

This isn't all a peaceful folk song, either: Spier gently but firmly reminds us that in addition to all the wicked humans in the world who perished when God's flood came, there were also countless other animal species, by definition innocent, who very much wanted a place on that ark and didn't get it:


The waters quickly and entirely cover the old man-dominated features of the landscape:


and then there's only the ark, in a vast expanse of water:


Spier delights in showing us the endless variety of chores and surprises on board during those forty days and forty nights. There's swabbing and cleaning and feeding and caring to be done, and the kindly Noah of these pictures also spares time to study and even to simply contemplate. Of course my favorite single panel in the book shows a late-night scene after one such busy, stressful day, when Noah rests at the candlelit table - in the company of the two species of animal who don't care about the flood and who would be on the ark with the man even if not a single drop of rain had fallen:


Eventually, the rains stop, the sun is seen again, and Noah sends out his famous dove to find flowering land. When the dove brings back its famous olive branch, it's cause for jubilation - Noah runs through the ark's various enclosures, waving the branch at his animal charges in happy triumph before feeding it to one of the cows (who've had, after all, no fresh grazing for forty days) - but before we see all that, Spier gives us a big quiet panel between husband and wife, as it dawns on them that their ordeal at sea might be coming to a close:


Only Christians could possibly be daft enough to view the story of Noah's ark as a parable about hope (the Jews rightly saw it for the catastrophic and probably useless cautionary tale that it is)(but then, the Jews see pretty much everything as a catastrophic and probably useless cautionary tale ... it's one of their many mordant charms) - they focus on that dove returning with its olive branch, rather than on the fact that God commits planetocide in a fit of pique. Noah finds favor in the eyes of the Lord, yes, but his experience clearly gives him Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as his later behavior in Genesis clearly indicates. But that story has no place in Spier's colorful little book - except perhaps in his choice of that book's final line: "... and he planted a vineyard."

The End of Civilization in the Penny Press?

By now I'm sure you've all seen the New York Times Book Review from Sunday, and I swear by Crom and Mitra, I originally intended simply to ignore it here at Stevereads. But you know what? The more of these little things we ignore, the more we give these little things not only power but legitimacy, and then forty years from now we look around at a world both mad and stupid and dare to ask "How on Earth did this happen?"

For those of you who perhaps don't take in the Book Review, a quick recap: James Parker (a Boston resident! How mortifying!) turned in a 1500-word review of the new Stephen King doorstop, Under the Dome, and the Book Review editors decided to run the thing on the cover. The New York Times Book Review is the single most influential yardstick and tastemaker in the book-selling world, of course; not only does 'New York Times bestseller' do wonders for the sale of any book from here to Lahore, but the Book Review actually determines the buying habits of countless thousands of over-moneyed middle-aged people all across the country, people who'll hand over their credit cards for anything between hard covers as long as it carries the Times seal of approval. Authors are paid bonuses entirely dependent on whether or not - and for how long - their book shows up on the Times list, because publishers know there's no advertising like it anywhere on the planet.

And as a great philosopher once said, with great power comes great responsibility.

James Parker confesses to be a lifelong fan of King's work, and that's fine. And millions of people read King's books, which is also fine (some reading being better than none at all). But Parker's piece isn't a book review - it's a barely-coherent fan letter, and it's the lead-off piece in the New York Times Book Review. Genuine, serious authors have new books out, and yet some Times editor decided the most coveted spot in book-press should go to an 1,100-page pulp novel Stephen King wrote in 480 days - and the book is given no legitimate criticism in that lead-off piece. And all of that is really, really bad.

King's novel is as tedious as a reformed drunk. An impenetrable dome suddenly appears over a small town in (yawn) Maine, and suddenly the local bullies are taking over, the local nutjobs are getting nuttier, and King has about a dozen dystopian tropes he can swat around for however the hell long he feels like it. There is nothing whatsoever noteworthy in this enormous book (the author so arrogantly flaunting how little time it took him to produce it looks downright dimwitted when set against the backdrop of how aggressively ordinary a book it is) - all the characters are stock characters, all the subplot outcomes can be predicted on page 2, all the dumb plot-contrivances are simply presented to the reader, linearly and in a sleepwalker's monotone.

And if Parker wants to like this crap, that's fine by me. But he does more than that - it's not that he praises it, it's that he writes his piece under the assumption that its worth as a book is immaterial, as if the mere fact that it was written by Stephen King not only warrants it our attention but exempts it from scrutiny. Parker was somehow allowed to write dark, malevolent nonsense like this:

As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P. G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison pinata: the realization that Howie was dead." (it's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.)

Where to start with this garbage? First, I guarantee Parker that rhyme wasn't accidental - I guarantee King intended it and sat back from 'unpleasant,' 'presents,' 'poison,' and 'pinata' with a proud little smile on his face. He's that far away from having any idea what good writing looks like. He isn't quite Wodehouse? Outhouse is more like it, and it's always been that way - the moronic shift Parker makes here from 'dominance' (which is a question of sales) to 'stylistically complete' (which isn't) is done with a fluidity only given to somebody who hasn't done fifteen minutes of genuine thinking about what he's typing - it's a sure sign that Parker couldn't have disliked this book, regardless of its contents. In fact, its contents get a complete pass:

We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source.

I was going to ignore this whole thing, I swear. But when the front-page essay of the New York Times Book Review slavishly praises Stephen King and mocks with words like "squeamish" those of us who dislike bad, lazy, cliched writing, something serious is going on - something perhaps worthy of comment, and something surely that should shame the Times. The Book Review has praised unworthy authors in the past, Gawd knows - but this is the first time they've allowed a reviewer to admit an author is unworthy and then praise him anyway, working on the assumption that all this hoity-toity palaver about bad writing is just so much squeamishness. It's quite literally the worst precedent any review journal could possibly set. Regardless of how many books Stephen King sells, his first drafts (what you get when you write 'flat-out' and then don't revise) are no more worth reading than anybody else's. James Parker is perfectly free to disagree - but he doesn't disagree. He admits the book is rushed and shoddy, then he tells us those things don't really matter.

That kind of sophomoric idiocy walks a quick path to intellectual irrelevance, and the fact that the Times either doesn't know that or knows it and is willing to risk it in order to win a few populist votes of sympathy ... well, that's the real horror story here.

Poetry Class!

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this is her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light may pass
Save two long rays through the hinge's chink.

Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, -
And the sweet white brow is all of her.

Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire and dew -
And, just because I was thrice as old
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?

No, indeed! for God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love's sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you.

But the time will come, - at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,
And your mouth to your own geranium's red -
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one's stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one in my soul's full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush, - I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret; go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.

"Evelyn Hope" - Robert Browning

tuck everlasting

Our book today is Natalie Babbitt's perfect little gem of a story, her 1975 novel Tuck Everlasting (with apologies for the movie-cover featuring the brainless Alexis Bledel and the tobacco-wasted Jonathan Jackson)(although if it's any consolation, the movie itself is quite good, with an especially brisk, reptilian performance by Ben Kingsley), which is just about as sweet and simple and penetrating a dramatization as I've ever read of what immortality might be like for a group of ordinary people who happened to stumble into it.

That group is the Tucks: father Angus, mother Mae, and their two sons, beautiful Jesse and brooding Miles, and Babbitt's story finds them all gathering together in the woods outside the village of Treegap. The Tucks make a point of coming together once every ten years or so, to spend some time as a family, and the locus they choose is the hidden spring in the center of the wood where, as thirsty prospective settlers eighty years ago, they paused to take a drink and found the water had made them immortal. They didn't realize what had happened to them at first - they moved on, Miles got married and had children - but eventually it became clear that everyone around them was aging while they stayed exactly the same. This has forced them to live a kind of gypsy life, never staying in any one place for more than about twenty years, lest the local inhabitants start to grow suspicious. Our story just happens to find them all gathered together for the first time in ten years, and on the cusp of that meeting, our ten-year-old heroine Winnie Foster, out wandering in the woods, spots Jesse sipping from the hidden spring and falls instantly in love (the book stresses repeatedly how beautiful he is, "even up close" - add that to the fact that he possesses a dark secret he's ambivalent about sharing with Winnie and you see just how close this book might have come to Twilight territory).

The Tucks bring her into their home in order to figure out what to do about the fact that she now knows about the secret spring, and when Winnie - who's been bossed and cosseted her whole life in her parents' tidy, expensive home - sees the lived-in ramshackle house of the Tuck family, she's right away likes it:

And still this was not all. For, on the old beamed ceiling of the parlor, streaks of light swam and danced and wavered like a bright mirage, reflected through the windows from the sunlit surface of the pond. There were bowls of daisies everywhere, gay white and yellow. And over everything was the clean, sweet smell of the water and its weeds, the chatter of a swooping kingfisher, the carol and trill of a dozen other kinds of bird, and occasionally the thrilling bass note of an unastonished bullfrog at ease somewhere along the muddy banks.

Into it all came Winnie, eyes wide, and very much amazed. It was a whole new idea to her that people could live in such disarray, but at the same time she was charmed. It was ... comfortable. Climbing behind Mae up the stairs to see the loft, she thought to herself: "Maybe it's because they think they have forever to clean it up." And this was followed by another thought, far more revolutionary: "Maybe they just don't care!"

The Tucks' main goal in showing her their home is to sit her down and try to convince her that telling anybody about the hidden spring would be a terrible idea - that it's not only natural but desirable that all things age and die and make room for new things. It's a lot to ask a ten-year-old to take in, but in Winnie is a wonderful character, wise beyond her years, and she's largely certain even before her talks with the family that she won't tell anybody. Angus Tuck takes her out on the pond for a heartfelt talk about how he and his family aren't really part of life anymore - and how distressing he finds that. And Miles takes her fishing on the pond and talks a little about that same distress, about knowing his own family grew up and grew old while he didn't change at all. Their talk is interrupted by a tug on the line:

And then Miles caught a fish. There it flopped, in the bottom of the boat, its jaws working, its gills fanning rapidly. Winnie drew up her knees and stared at it. It was beautiful, and horrible too, with gleaming, rainbow-colored scales, and an eye like marble beginning to dim even as she watched it. The hook was caught in its upper lip, and suddenly Winnie wanted to weep. "Put it back, Miles," she said, her voice dry and harsh. "Put it back right away."

Miles started to protest, and then, looking at her face, he picked up the trout and gently worked the barbed hook free. "All right, Winnie," he said. He dropped the fish over the edge of the boat. It flipped its tail and disappeared under the lily pads.

The plot thickens when a man comes to Treegap intent on finding the Tucks and their miraculous spring, and the last 50 pages of the book blur by, but for my money, it's these gentle ruminations on the nature of mortality that make Tuck Everlasting such a marvelous book (and such a perfect example of the phenomenon I've mentioned here at Stevereads often enough, how the best so-called "children's" and "young adult" fiction is really "everybody" fiction). The choice that Winnie makes at the novel's close is both predictable and stunning, and it will send the reader (perhaps especially the young reader) away with a head full of questions about what really matters in life. Excellent questions for anybody to ask, and a fine book to do the prompting.

The Grizzly Bear!

Our book today is Thomas McNamee's 1982 natural history masterpiece, The Grizzly Bear, the best, most poetic, most memorable book ever written about one of the world's most famous oversized Pleistocene holdovers. This is higher praise than it sounds, since the grizzly bear has inspired quite a few really good pieces of writing in the last hundred and fifty years. These animals have been hunted mercilessly, trapped, tormented, eradicated from over 90 percent of their old North American ranges, but they've also always held a particular fascination for human beings, and the reason is twofold. First and most obvious, grizzlies are spectacularly dangerous animals - the true size and heft of an adult male has to be seen up in person to be believed, and although the females are smaller, their legendary ferocity in defense of their cubs has been the well-known (and in once case, even, in the last artistic activity of the man's life, well-photographed) cause of many bear attacks. And second, grizzlies are oddly, very noticeably like human beings in many ways. As McNamee points out in his book, these bears are highly individualistic - they do things their own way, figure out problems with disarming speed, and are seldom too busy to stop and amuse themselves once in a while.

If you happen to do any back-country hiking in norther and western Canada, it's probably the first of these two things that'll be on your mind. It's a land-equivalent to the experience of swimming in the ocean with the possibility of sharks: there's something incredibly unnerving about knowing there's a larger-than-negligible chance you could run into a smart, irritable animal powerful enough to kill or maim you without even really trying. If you're hiking with a group of true and valiant dogs (basset hounds need not apply), you probably don't have to worry about the killing or maiming (even a full-grown grizzly is unlikely to attack a well-coordinated dog pack), but if you're without such company (McNamee has a hilarious, withering section about a whining young hiking couple coming witlessly close to encountering some bears) and you meet a bear in the wild, you're about as helpless as you can be. It can put a damper on even the prettiest walk.

McNamee knows his animal well. His book follows a fictional, slightly idealized trio of bears - a mother and her two cubs - for a year of seasons and problems and challenges. By taking his readers this way through the cubs' experience of learning how to be a bear (including "the three fundamental rules of grizzly bear cubhood: follow mother, obey mother, have, within those constraints, as good a time as possible"), he's hit on the perfect means to teach his readers the same things. The best parts of his book are the many places where he shows us just how much there is to learn:

A well-educated and experienced grizzly bear's knowledge of his home range is astoundingly comprehensive and precise. Our mother bear remembers not only where she found good things to eat last year but also where, six years ago, in a summer of drought, a low moist spot in an otherwise sere expanse of sun-parched timothy still held a pocket of lush bluegrass.She remembers which slopes and ridgetops are the first to be blown free of snow in spring. She remembers, even before their aerial parts appear, where the richest starchy roots and tubers may be dug. She knows the buried whereabouts of pocket gopher populations. She remember where, each fall, the squirrels have harvested and hidden their hoards of pine nuts. She knows the locations of all the avalanche chutes in her range, where the frequent snowslides have limited the vegetation to that which can withstand all that cascading snow - the grasses, supple-stemmed shrubs, and forbs (soft-stemmed plants that die down to the ground in winter, most of which are familiar as wildflowers) - and she remembers which of those avalanche chutes, facing south, are first to catch the sun and therefore first to green up. Even now, as they learn to grasp the blades of sedge in their back molars and roll their heads to snap it off, the cubs are storing up essential memories.

And that mention of squirrel pine nut hoards comes back later to demonstrate another of McNamee's strengths - his droll sense of humor. You very much want that in a natural history writer, but you don't often get it:

the bear is superbly adept at gobbling them [the hoards] up: she smashes the cones with her teeth or paws, spreads the debris out on the ground, and delicately licks up only the nuts. The few pine cone scales that find their way in with the nuts, she spits out the side of her mouth. With singularly ursine fair-mindedness, she will often also smash and eat the squirrels themselves.

I can't recommend coming anywhere near a wild grizzly (even the dog-company option runs the unfortunate risk of costing you a dog or two), but I recommend The Grizzly Bear whole-heartedly. It should be on every bookshelf of truly great works of natural history.

The Deep!

Our book today is the 1976 novel The Deep, and it's the answer to a question several of you have emailed me (because Gawd forbid any of you shy little buggers should, you know, post a comment or anything)(this has got to be the strangest blogger/reader relationship I know of - par for the course in my life, actually): did Peter Benchley ever write anything worth reading other than Jaws?

The answer is problematic, and it connects with a long-held belief of mine, which is that novelists very, very often write more than is good for them. I firmly believe that virtually everybody has one genuinely good book inside them, and I love the fact that typing, editing, and even publishing technology has become so easy and ubiquitous that hundreds of thousands more people than in, say, the 1960s can go a lot further toward actually writing that book than they could at any other time in history. Writing schools abound, writing groups populate the back booths of every Bickford's and Denny's from here to Costa Mesa, and of course the entire Internet is one gigantic, horrifyingly diverse exercise in writing. The making of many books has never been easier, and that's a good thing.

The problem is - and always has been, even before FicPro 2000 and the like - that once somebody actually writes a book, two powerful factors often propel them to write another. The first of these factors is inborn and intangible, but that doesn't necessarily make it right: it's intoxicating. Creating a fictional world, shaping it, populating it, driving that population - it's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't done it, but everybody who has done it will understand immediately. Crafting that creation, going inside it day after day, gradually orchestrating it to tell the stories you want it to tell, and then, when you're finished, writing 'the end' ... well, as difficult as it'll be for you non-writers to believe, there's really no feeling in the world that's sweeter. Once you do it, you very much want to do it again - whether you have the inspiration, industry, or information to make it work a second (or twenty-second) time.

The second factor is crass and therefore well-known: if you make money writing a novel, chances are very good you'll want to make even more money writing a second, and a third. Writers have often been contractually obligated to keep writing, even though, in my opinion, 99 percent of writers don't have much more than one worthwhile book inside them. Generally, that's the fiction math: one book that's wholly yours, irresistibly burning inside you to get out, to be expressed, and then maybe 20 percent material overspill that can, if stretched and fluffed, be made into a second novel that will more or less stand upright. Usually, everything else is dry humping.

There are exceptions, of course - probably you're thinking of the same exceptions I am. But keep in mind, if you can (and let's be honest here: I'm probably in a better position to do that than most of you are), the absolutely VAST amount of novels that have been published in the last 200 years. The number beggars description; trust me, the exceptions we're thinking of sink into that sea without even the smallest ripple. For every Tolstoy writing both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, there are, without exaggeration, 4 or 5 million one-hit wonders grinding out their fifteenth soulless book.

Benchley's fiction-writing career is a pretty close example of what I'm talking about. In Jaws he found his one perfect idea and knocked it out of the park - a giant killer shark preys on a popular beachfront community, thereby unleashing all kinds of predation between the humans involved. Almost everything he wrote after that book feels grasping, attenuated, and incomplete.

Almost everything. He, too, had that roughly 20 percent overspill, and he used it to craft an older manuscript into the adventure novel called The Deep, which is the only one of his novels other than Jaws that's worth reading. It's the story of a honeymooning couple in Bermuda - David Sanders and his much younger wife Gail, who while scuba-diving come across the wreck of a reef-torn ship and find not only WWII-era ampules of some sort of drug but also much, much older artifacts. Wondering what exactly it is they've found, they're directed by helpful locals to crusty old lighthouse keeper Romer Treece, who comes off as a slightly more eloquent version of Captain Quint:

The bottom of the sea is a living creature. She's whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That's happened. And we've had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.

But whatever native strength Benchley had as a storyteller is already beginning to weaken in this book, and the narrative quickly crowds up with predictability, including a slick villain - Henri Cloche - who sounds like he's reading his dialogue straight out of an old MGM handbook:

"They [the couple's motorbikes] will be returned in the morning. A final word: Make no mistake about it - should you still be inclined to be ... hasty ... and go to the authorities, you will find that, officially, I do not exist. And should you try to get out of this by leaving Bermuda, you will also discover that, in reality, I exist everywhere." His back stiffened. "There will be no haven."

What he wants Sanders and his wife to do, Mr. Bond, is dive ... dive the wreck and recover as much of its cargo as possible, for which service he will pay them one million dollars (which was a lot of money back then, as they say). You can probably guess the rest yourself, but the key here is to remember that all the movies and TV shows and Scott Smith novels this plot reminds you of came from this book, not the other way around. The plot itself - innocents find something deadly in a shipwreck and become morally compromised by it - is rock-solid. It's only Benchley's ability to fully exploit it as a writer that's flagging just a bit.

Just a bit. The Deep will still work on you - it's sharply, leanly told, and it will pull you in, and you'll be glad you gave it the lazy afternoon it takes to read it (like Jaws, it's very much a book you should read in one sitting). It's fathoms and fathoms better than all of Benchley's later books (they at best have only scattered worthwhile scenes, and sometimes only scattered worthwhile moments) - but it's no Anna Karenina, alas.