Mosquitoes, by William Faulkner. Horace Liveright Inc. 1927

“Mosquitoes” was the second novel Faulkner wrote. It’s a satire set in New Orleans, and while it’s amusing it’s not really laugh out loud funny. It’s a sort of “Ship of Fools” but with a smaller boat and possibly more foolish people.



A woman of means, Mrs. Maurier, who wields power in the art buying world, arranges a boat party for a few artists and writers. Her niece and nephew are also included, and they snag a couple of other people they’ve never even met before, right off the dock. This mismatched group, who apparently didn’t think things through, finds themselves on Lake Pontchartrain for several days. Mrs. Maurier seems to expect artistic conversation and jolly dances. Instead she gets people who stay consistently drunk and who try and seduce each other. And complain about the fact that they are served grapefruits at every meal. The boat runs aground, some of them try and swim to shore and walk back to the Big Easy, another someone disappears.



These are some of the most annoying people on earth. If I were stuck on a boat with them for days, I’d go overboard, too. It’s fun to read about them at times, but I have to admit I was bored part of the time, too. There is a good bit of repetition. I had trouble remembering who was who- three of the men seemed interchangeable (one was even called “the Semitic man” instead of named most of the time!) and a couple of the young girls did, too. They are the true parasites of the story, not the mosquitoes which, while biting constantly, are never named. None of the women are portrayed in a good light. Three stars.

The Short Reign of Pippin IV, by John Steinbeck. Viking, 1957

In this short piece of political satire, the French government decides to bring the monarchy back. They settle on Pippin Heristal, an amateur astronomer who lives on the income from some vineyards. As a constitutional monarch, there isn’t really much useful he can do, and he finds himself obliged to live uncomfortably in a palace, and put up with an infinite number of hangers-on, all who have inherited positions that suddenly are providing them with money. He just wishes to go back to his old life. His practical wife, Marie, figures that running a country should be like running a household, and her best friend, a nun who was formerly a show girl, gives sage advice. As does an old man who lives by a lake, who Pippin meets on one of his escapes from the palace, which he manages disguised as a common man, riding a motor scooter. It goes to his feminist, politically active daughter’s head and she instantly turns into a Disney princess.

While written in 1957, a good lot of the satire is still relatable today. People and politics really haven’t changed much. The book pokes fun at America just as much as at France, and it’s a quick, sort of fun read if you’re a Steinbeck fan- although it’s very different from any of his other books. Four stars.   

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Stickle Island, by Tim Orchard. The Unnamed Press, 2018

Stickle Island is a tiny bit of earth in the ocean, a mile off the south east shore of England. The population is small; most people have long since moved away in search of jobs. A few back-to-the-landers have moved there. The entire population can fit into one meeting hall at the same time. The story takes place during Thatcher’s term of rule; the twice daily ferry that is their life line to the mainland is something that will be cut. How will they survive on the island without this service?

Their salvation arrives after a terrible storm; six bales of high grade marijuana have washed up on shore. Realizing the value of these, and that there is apt to be someone who expected their arrival out looking for them, they are promptly hidden by a small group of enterprising teens, who call a general meeting of the entire populace. Together they will stand against the dealers when they arrive. And arrive they do, with fancy cars and armed muscle.

This is a satire, and it reminds me of lots of British sit-coms. If you’re into British comedy, you can pretty much picture the cast and setting. It’s not deep, and the characters are not well developed, but it’s great fun. Four stars for this first novel.

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After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, by Aldous Huxley. Elephant Paperback, 1939

This book is a somewhat odd mash-up of satire and philosophical lecture. On the one hand, we have an uber rich old man, Jo Stoyte, who lives in a castle in the San Fernando Valley. He owns a bank, a cemetery, an oil company… his home is reminiscent of Hearst Castle, filled with every modern convenience and stuffed with art from around the world bought with no plan or passion. His very young live in girlfriend is called The Baby. He also has a live in physician, Obispo, who has no redeeming qualities, (I do wonder where he got his degree) to watch over him, give him testosterone shots, and do research on extending the human life span. At the beginning of the story a British scholar, Jeremy Pordage, arrives, to work on the crates and crates of documents from the Hauberk family- this seems at first to have no bearing on the story, but in the end, it very much does. The other main characters are Peter, Obispo’s young, innocent assistant, and Mr. Propter, who does not live in the castle. While the other characters are the satire of capitalism, lechery, conspicuous consumption, Forest Lawn type cemeteries, and the fear of death, Propter is the moral and philosophical force. And, sadly, while the rest of the story is pretty amusing- and horrific in places- Propter is as dry as a mummy’s fart. He’s a noble person- he helps out the migrant workers (remember, this is during the Depression), is working on a way for people to be self-sufficient, and is against the kind of wealth aggregation that Stoyte represents- but he does not serve to advance the plot at all. It’s like Huxley couldn’t decide what kind of book to write, so he wrote them both and did not blend them elegantly at all. Four stars. 

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Catalina: A Romance, by Somerset Maugham. Doubleday& Co, 1948

Catalina is a 15 year old Spanish girl living in the time of the Inquisition. One day she is laying on the steps of the cathedral, crying because she cannot walk- one of her legs is permanently injured- to see the triumphant entry into the city of two of its favored sons. Of Don Juan de Valero’s three sons, two are famous- one a bishop, the other a warrior in the pay of the king. The third is a humble baker, who stayed to take care of his parents, raise a loving family, and help the poor. Suddenly a woman appears behind her, who asks her what is wrong. Catalina expresses her woe over her leg, including the fact that her inability to walk has caused her beloved to dump her in favor of another girl, one capable of the demanding physical labor of surviving and raising a family in those times. The woman tells her that she can be healed by the son of Don Juan de Valero who has served God the best, and vanishes. Obviously, the woman has to have been the Virgin Mary.

A good section of the book is devoted to describing the lives of the three sons, especially the Bishop. He has lived a life of extreme devotion, wearing a hair shirt and whipping himself for his sins. He is obviously the first choice for healing Catalina. After Catalina is healed, the head of the convent in town wants her to become a nun, feeling that the presence of a living miracle will add fame to the convent- and money in its coffers as pilgrims arrive. But Catalina has other ideas…

And here the story falls apart to me. The first part is a satire of the institutions of the medieval church and caste system, and I enjoyed it. But after Catalina is cured, we leave that frame of mind and end up in “Don Quixote”! Literally- Catalina and her small band of entertainers run into a group of actors from somewhere in Cervantes novel and spend a good bit of time with them. Now, that section of “Don Quixote” was pretty senseless to me, and it doesn’t improve in “Catalina”. So, the first half or more of this novel is witty and good; the last part just seems to fill up space (when I read “Don Quixote”, I wondered if Cervantes had been paid by the word). Three and a half stars. 

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The Sea, The Sea; A Severed Head; by Iris Murdoch, with introduction by Sarah Churchill. Everyman’s Library, 2016

This nicely bound volume contains two of Murdoch’s works; ‘A Severed Head’ written in 1961, and ‘The Sea, The Sea’, penned in 1978. While both have male narrators and deal with love affairs, they are very different in tone.

‘A Severed Head’ is a bedroom farce, a short work (less than 200 pages) that details a short time in the life of comfortably well off wine dealer Martin. Martin has both a wife (Antonia) and a mistress (Georgie). All is well in his world. Then Antonia tells him that she wants a divorce; she is in love their friend and therapist, Palmer. She wishes to leave immediately. Palmer and Georgia wish to stay good friends with Martin, though, which Martin accedes to. It’s all very, very civilized. As the tale goes it, it turns out that nothing is as it seemed to Martin; people are coupling up all over the place and with everyone else. Despite his being cuckolded before he ever strayed, and being jerked around by everyone, I found it impossible to feel any sympathy for Martin; it’s not far into the story before he begins hitting people, something he continues to do. No one seems to have a whole lot of brains, just lust and manners. It’s funny in ways, a satire of morals and manners.

In ‘The Sea, The Sea’, the narrator is older and single, a retired actor and director who has bought a remote house on the coast that is falling into decay. He begins to write a combined memoir and diary, which is the story we read. Charles Arrowby is over sixty, and is wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless, and well known- although not as well-known as he likes to think. At his new home, he enjoys swimming in the sea, looking for pretty rocks, making horrible sounding meals, and fixating on women from his past. First he lights on Lizzie, who, having given up on Charles, is happily cohabiting with a gay friend. After he sends her a letter indicating he wants her back, she is ready to drop her partner. Then he accidently runs into a woman from even further back in his past: Hartley, the girl he grew up with and who was his first live, the girl who vanished and never made contact again, whose mother told Charles she was married and never wanted to see him again. One contact and he becomes obsessed with her. She admits she’s afraid of her husband Ben, and that their son ran away to escape him. This convinces him she’s trapped in an abusive marriage, and he is going to save her. He begins to stalk her, and eventually kidnaps and imprisons her in his house.

Meanwhile, he is dealing with the plague that everyone who moves to a holiday-ish locale has to live with: everyone he knows comes to visit. An old girlfriend, Lizzie and her partner, more old friends, Hartley’s estranged son, and his cousin James that he hasn’t seen for decades, all come calling without warning- of course, he doesn’t have a phone. Also, the house may be haunted. These people allow us to see things through eyes other than Charles’s; Hartley’s son fills in some of the background of Hartley’s marriage and Ben’s brutishness, while others see Ben in a very different light.

I had a hard time keeping track of the passage of time in this novel; Charles seems to exist in an alcohol fueled cloud of obsession. While the book was interesting, and I couldn’t stop reading it, I really disliked Charles. He is very much the center of the universe and no one else’s needs or wants intrude upon his thinking. His friends I have to wonder about, as they continue to party while being aware of his prisoner. I have to say the ending surprised me; it seemed tacked on in a way, but though short, it grabbed my interest in a way parts of the main story didn’t. We are left with the mystery of who and what Cousin James really was; I would have liked to know more about him than Charles!

While both stories contain people who act like fools, the writing is top notch and I enjoyed reading them- ‘The Sea, the Sea’ is some 450 pages long but I read it in a couple of days. 

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Neither of these things influenced my review.