The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

A haunted house story set in England in the years just after WWII, The Little Stranger’s creepiness comes not just from the decaying mansion and its inhabitants, living and otherwise, but also from the claustrophobically rigid habits of thought of its extremely unreliable narrator.

The house is Hundreds Hall, a grand Georgian mansion now left to rot in the hands of the Ayres family: a bitter, disabled war veteran; his plain, sturdy, self-effacing sister; and their doddering, once-elegant widowed mother. Our protagonist, Dr. Faraday, is a country doctor who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps from working-class roots. In a supremely British way he is very conscious of this, and very white, and very male.

Ms. Waters does a terrific job creating a window into the mind of a man who has no idea how blinkered he is, or how condescending. He’s such a man of his place and time, the book almost reads as if it had been written by a man of that period. This is, to me, what makes it interesting: the character study of Dr. Faraday.

In his mind, there’s a natural order to things that it would never occur to him to question. People of the lower classes and women of all classes either function properly and stay in their places, in which case he can safely disregard them; or they don’t, in which case he can chasten them or doctor them or send them off to the appropriate institution.

Meanwhile, the Ayres family is terribly isolated. The local folks see them as wealthy and powerful, which of course they once were at one point, and therefore too snobbish to rub elbows with the hoi polloi. But it has been decades since the estate could support itself and in fact its inhabitants are reduced to selling it off, bit by bit, just to keep food in the pantry and gasoline in the generator.

The Ayreses, being both proud of their heritage and ashamed of their current financial state, feel they have to keep to themselves. Until Dr. Faraday appears on the scene and slowly insinuates himself into the household. Around the same time, things at The Hundreds start going weirdly amiss, and naturally the good doctor won’t entertain any supernatural explanations. Hijinks ensue and the plot thickens, with the assistance of everybody’s God-given prejudices.

Verdict: read it if you love a good haunted house story, or if you enjoy a well-written period piece whose characters’ psychology is true to their time and place, or if you just want to read the book first so you can sneer at the movie. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Narrated by Michael C. Hall

For Valentine’s Day this year, my partner took me to a special screening-with-dinner of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was just about the perfect date. I’d seen the movie maybe half a dozen times, all told, but never on the big screen, and he’d never seen it at all. I fell in love with it all over again, warts and all—and the warts, I admit, are a pretty disfiguring blemish on what is otherwise a crown jewel of a movie.

To start with, you have Audrey Hepburn playing the quirky, unapologetic gold-digger, Holly Golightly. The point of view character, Paul Varjak, is also something of a whore (though in the service of his art), and is played by a very debonair young George Peppard. The two are a perfect match, because they can each love other for who they actually are; there’s no need for pretense between them. But of course it can never work, because they both depend on their lovers for money and neither of them has a dime of their own, and nobody ever heard of open relationships or polyamory in those days.

In case you’ve never seen the movie, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Go see it! Seriously. Be prepared to cry at the end, but also, be prepared to have to stomach some breathtakingly casual racism—not just part of the scenery because 1961, but mined, over and over again, for laughs, because ha ha, we’re all white folks together here and aren’t those people funny. But if you can and are willing to handle that, see it. It’s a masterpiece and I cry every time.

I had never, in spite of my love for this film, read the book it was based on. Hadn’t realized it was based on a book at all. But it turns out that it is: it’s based on a novella by Truman Capote, and the novella is just as flawed and just as much of a jewel as the movie.

(Ah, a dying art form, the novella. And yet it shouldn’t be. I get that books are expensive and people want a lot of bang for their book-buying buck, and so publishers favor enormous tomes these days. And I do love me a really good, meaty, enormous tome. But haven’t we all read at least one bloated, flabby enormous tome too many that should, and in the hands of a good editor would, have been a really excellent novella?)

The basic setup is the same as the movie. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak are neighbors in an apartment building in New York City; he’s an aspiring professional writer, and she’s an aspiring wife of somebody rich. Ideally, somebody rich who isn’t a complete rat, though really, any man who refrains from trying to take advantage of her situation pretty much qualifies as a non-rat; she has a generous heart. She has a lot in common with her cat: they share a fiercely independent but deeply affectionate nature. She’s also a runaway from her own past as a child bride from Texas.

She has to hide all of this from the wealthy men she seeks, with a great deal of success, to intoxicate, and whom she hopes to lure into marriage so she can be financially secure at last. But she doesn’t hide a thing from her neighbor, Paul, who after all isn’t anywhere near the demographic she’s seeking. Which means he gets to know the real Holly—the Holly she has invented for herself, who contains but is far more worldly, self-assured, and fun-loving than the Lulamae Barnes she used to be.

Paul, meanwhile, struggles to get published, and struggles with an extremely low sense of self-worth: as a man, he should be able to be a self-sufficient success. He starts out nonplussed by his flighty neighbor; he appreciates her beauty and the vulnerability she radiates and the unexpected things that happen when she is part of his world, but is taken aback by her chosen path in life and her pursuit of it with a predator’s cold, clear, unswerving sense of purpose. Eventually, of course, he falls in love, and things—not hijinks, exactly, though some of them closely resemble hijinks—ensue.

Many of the scenes in the book are written exactly as they ended up being portrayed on the screen. Capote’s gift for description—of people’s appearance and surroundings, directly, and of their character through their words and the way they speak—is tremendous; anybody having read the book first would be delighted at the faithfulness of the film adaptation.

However, there are numerous differences, large and small. Paul Varjak isn’t a sugar baby in the book; his empathy for Ms. Golightly is harder-won than that, and slower to develop. There’s a major character in the book who is written out of the movie script. And the racism, just as breathtakingly casual in the book as in the movie, is mostly aimed at a different target and isn’t mined for laughs; instead, it rears its head as a method of describing-without-describing just how flawed a person Holly Golightly is, as well as being generally in the background because 1958.

Still, the story is intriguing. It’s written with such skill that not a single necessary or desirable detail is left out, and yet not a single unneccessary word is left in. As one would expect, the characters are more complex and fully-fleshed-out than in the movie.

Oh, and the ending is different. I won’t spoil it. Read the book!