The Advantage of The Current Situation

It leaves me plenty of time to read.

Testing the Current, William McPherson - It's probably because of the books I normally read, i kept expecting something to happen in this book. It's essentially one year in the life of an 8-year old boy, called Tommy, who lives in some Northeastern town during the late 1930s. The book is a 3rd person narration of what goes on, focused entirely on Tommy's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the events. It's not about families struggling to rise out of the Depression, as Tommy's family is at least upper middle class (his father owns some sort of factory, what they produce exactly I'm unsure, possibly because Tommy doesn't know either). Really, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be about, maybe that children learn more than anyone realizes. Tommy seems to pick up all sorts of things, whether he just overhears them, or the adults actually confide him (as Mrs. Slade does in explaining why she takes morphine, and I disagree with Tommy's brother, who described her as a dope fiend. I think someone who had a masectomy, and then was caught in a fire could be excused if they took something for their pain.)

Tme method McPherson uses to tell the story is, I think, meant to evoke the somewhat scattershot way a child might relate a story to you, full of tangents as they occur to the child. Early in the story, Tommy relates how he likes oldest of his two brothers more, because he's nice to Tommy sometimes, and bought him a box of crayons with 48 colors for his birthday. Then, 200 some odd page later, we actually reach that birthday, and Tommy mentions it again. And this happens frequently, Tommy mentioning something multiple times in the story, the first time usually as a way of describing a character, the next time within the larger story he's trying to tell. I can't decide whether I find it cute, or irritating.

A Remarkable Case of Burglary, HRF Keating - This book reminds me of Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, though I'm not certain that's a compliment. I remember being annoyed by that book, since it spent seemingly 95% of itself on the setup, and very little on the actually robbery. This book isn't skewed quite that severely. A poor young fellow named Val observes a young servantmaiden scrubbing the stairs of a nice house. He suddenly decides that he can probably woo her, and while doing so, learn all about the house she works in, so he can rob it blind. And away we go, with various stumbling blocks as Janey grows uncertain of herself, or the master of the house is gripped by paranoia, or Val does something particularly stupid, or whatever.

Keating plays around a bit, establishing that even though Val gains comprehensive information about the home and its inhabitants from not just one, but two servants, no one ever mentions that the family's youngest child still lives there, and that he has a governess. It seems terribly strange that would never be mentioned, when they were being so thorough in learning every detail of the house. It seems obvious that will be their undoing, and it sort of is, but really, it comes down tot the fact that Val (who was originally attracted to Janey), fell for another girl, but had to keep seeing Janey under the pretense of caring for her, and the tension that can create.

It's an amusing enough story at times, but I don't see why Keating was so attached to military analogies. he frequently draws comparisons between either the scene that has just concluded, or the one coming next, and some military campaign. So Val attempted to sneak in the house and examine the plate closet, only to be discovered by the head maid, very nearly leads to ruin, but is averted by the intrusion of the kindly butler. Well, keating feels the need to compare it to patrols from rival battalions, missing each other in the fog. It's really quite unneccessary.