Review: WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Bertha is the madwoman locked in the attic by her husband Rochester, the simmering Englishman whose children Jane has been hired to tutor. In Bronte's novel we learn little about Bertha other than that she's a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom Rochester was long ago pressured into marrying for her money. But Rhys, who grew up in the French Caribbean colony of Dominica, presses on the silences in Bronte to give Bertha her own story. Caliban does not become Ariel here, but Rhys turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman, and one whose story says whole worlds about global mixtures, about the misunderstandings between the colonized, the colonizers and the people who can't easily say which they are.

Review: ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren

I seem to recall not reading this book when it was on a summer reading list during high school. While missing a good story those 40 odd years ago, my procrastination was arguably to the good. Warren's compelling tale of power and corruption in the Depression-era South is more than just a great political story; it is a sustained meditation on the unforeseen consequences of every human act, the vexing connectedness of all people and the possibility—however slim—of goodness in a sinful world. I definitely related more strongly to these themes than I would have in my callow youth.

Willie Stark, Warren's lightly disguised version of Huey Long, the onetime Louisiana strongman/governor, begins as a genuine tribune of the people and ends as a murderous populist demagogue. The narrator, Jack Burden, is his press agent, who carries out the boss's orders, first without objection, then in the face of his own increasingly troubled conscience. And the politics? For Warren, that's simply the arena most likely to prove that man is a fallen creature. Which it does.