Topper: Far from a Flop

Topper got added to my "to read" pile last July, when Free Acres in Berkeley Heights had its 100th anniversary. BHPL had an exhibit on Free Acres resident and illustrator Will Crawford that included this sign, The Flop:

Crawford carved it for his neighbor, Thorne Smith, who in 1926 was sure that his comic novel Topper would be a flop. But it actually became his most famous book. In 1937 Topper was made into a movie starring Cary Grant, and then it became a TV show from 1953 to 1955 starring Leo Carroll, Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys.

Topper lives on Glendale Road (there's one in Summit, although it's impossible to say for sure which New Jersey town Topper is from) and leads a boring, upright life, commuting to New York by train every day. A midlife crisis spurs him to buy the restored automobile formerly owned by George and Marion Kerby, a fun-loving couple who died when the car hit a tree. Topper's wife finds the car flashy and wants nothing to do with it, which is probably for the best since Topper is a terrible driver and the car is haunted by the ghosts of George and Marion.

George and Marion can physically materialize and dematerialize at will, which leads to many comedic scenes, notably when Topper, George and Marion get into a fight with the locals at a pharmacy and the following courtroom scene. I downloaded it onto an iPod from ListenNJ and found it amusing, but you'll need to make some allowances for the fact that it was published 85 years ago.

The Art Detective by Philip Mould

"Two months earlier I had told an old lady that her early-twentieth-century portrait of a young girl would be worth more if the child were better looking. She then revealed it was a portrait of herself as a child. From that moment I swore always to ask clients what they knew before wading in."


With lines like these, reading The Art Detective feels like you're seated next to the author Philip Mould at a dinner party, listening to him talk about his adventures in art. The Art Detective tells the story of six paintings the London art dealer and BBC Antiques Roadshow host has encountered over his career, or as the subtitle of the book says, "fakes, frauds and finds". The finds were the most interesting to read about, especially the ones that were transformed by the daring removal of paint added in later years.

These news stories should give you a taste for the subject of the book, although they're no substitute.

Rare Gainsborough Uncovered by Antiques Roadshow Presenter

No Flattery Is Found in an Imitation of a Rockwell

The One That Got Away: Fisherman's Legal Battle Over £150,000 Artwork

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Reading Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace for the library book group meeting this Friday morning, I couldn't help but think of the similarities to the Amanda Knox murder trial: a beautiful young woman on trial for a scandalous murder, with plenty of room for conjecture as to her innocence or guilt.

Alias Grace is based on the 1843 double murder of a land owner in Ontario and his housekeeper/lover. The hired man, who was hanged for the murder, said that the 16 year-old servant girl Grace made him - and helped him - kill the housekeeper. Whether Grace and the hired man were lovers who ran away together, or whether he forced her to go with him at gunpoint, is something that will keep readers turning the pages.

Being the work of Margaret Atwood, the book is of course much more than an account of a murder. Alias Grace was her first work of historical fiction, and it put her on the Booker Prize short list for the third time (she eventually won for The Blind Assassin). This is one of my favorite passages - Grace is speaking:

I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

Useful links

Margaret Atwood's Letter to the Reader

Random House interview with Margaret Atwood

Salon interview with Margaret Atwood: "Blood and Laundry"

Discussion questions

More discussion questions

Self-evident Consumer Warnings

As I removed the reflective sun shade from my car windshield this morning, I noticed the warning: 'Remove this sun shade before operating automobile'. Really? Now, I'm not the first person to notice that some consumer warnings are just stupid,  but, how, I ask myself, can this be related to library usage? How, in other words, can I use this observation to write a blog post that will sneak up on blog readers and make them Love Libraries and Love Reading and make them immediately drop everything and come to the library to check out dozens of books AND OTHER MATERIALS, as we like to say these days? In other words, how to use this as a hook to MARKET THE LIBRARY? What if we put warning labels on books: Caution, reading this book might make you smarter. How about a warning label on the front door of the library: Caution, enter at your own risk, library contains thousands of entertaining books, DVD's and audiobooks. A warning at the top of the sign-up sheets for computer classes: Be advised that taking computer classes may result in addiction to your computer. The sign over the Reference Desk currently says: "Questions? Ask Us" we could add, and Librarian May be Unable to Stop Recommending Books, Websites and other resources.
Related blog:
The "M" Word-Marketing Libraries

Personal Growth through Isolation

Joan Anderson's memoir A Year by the Sea, thoughts of an unfinished woman (1999) chronicles the year she took off from her marriage to "find herself". The author  starts each chapter with inspirational quotes from the similar A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and other sources. Many reviews on GoodReads compare it to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2006). This genre of memoir can perhaps be traced back to Viginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) What all three books share is the idea that women should have a space all to themselves, or take time and space, in order to maintain their individuality.  When writing about this idea, a modern author has to be careful not to tip to the side of selfishness, self-involvement, whining and entitlement. Reviewers differ on whether Anderson tips more to the selfish than the self-reflective. For me, classics, but not memoirs, like A Room of One's Own and Henrik Ibsen's The Doll's House, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder treat women's dilemma of individuality so beautifully that it's difficult to tolerate the clunky prose styles of contemporary memoirists who attempt to shed light on the issue.
"A Year by the Sea' is not a classic piece of literature though, it's a quick, painless read. Anderson does what so many women, and men for that matter, would like to do: chuck it all and escape to a cozy cottage on Cape Cod (or wherever - fill in place here) and then write a bestseller about it that sells to the Oprah crowd. But wait, that's not all! Anderson follows this memoir with several others and she has a business that provides expensive "workshops" for women seeking to find themselves. I'm just picturing what a workshop by Virginia Woolf would have been like... 

Read-a-likes: popular memoirs by women authors

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion: musings on illness and death in the family.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls - puts the "dys" in dysfunctional family.

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, or any of her books; Lamott is funny and flawed.

The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway, if you like to read about Australia.

My review of Take Big Bites by Linda Ellerbee which I loved because she is funny and self-deprecating.
My review of Mutant Message Down Under, a memoir which may be a hoax and which I found even more annoyingly narrow-minded than Eat, Pray, Love and A Year by the Sea.