Spring has been hectic, in covering the arts of Western New York, and I have been impatiently waiting for an opportunity to share with you my thoughts on the publication of a new novel by Chautauqua County resident Susan Crossett.

We reviewed Crossett’s debut novel, ”Her Reason for Being,” some years ago, and we always enjoy reading her column, ”Musings from the Hill,” in the Dunkirk OBSERVER.

Since a book review rarely requires a full column, this is also a chance to review a few more of the many books which I have read, but have not yet reviewed, plus a brilliant and thought-provoking film which I have recently seen. I hope you enjoy this week’s material as much as I have.

LOVE IN THREE ACTS

Crossett’s latest publication contains many of the things I respect and enjoy the most: classical music, travel, character development, and best of all, the world view of an interesting woman.

The book’s full title is ”Love in Three Acts: A Work of Fiction.” It’s central focus is on a character named Elizabeth or Libby. We get three perspectives on her long life, beginning in 1960, when she is a graduate student, studying music. We first meet her as she prepares to leave with three of her female friends, for a concert tour of Italy, which they have won in a competition, as a string quartet. Libby is the cellist in the group. Donna is the violist, and Jean and Marty are the violinists.

None of the women has been abroad before this tour, and the Italy to which they travel is only 15 years removed from its conquest by American and British troops, during its Fascist flirtation with Hitler. American money was worth a great deal in recovering Italy, and the women are leaving a society which is extremely closed – as late as 1966, American women students in college still were required to wear skirts or dresses to dinner, and weren’t allowed out of their dormitories past 11 p.m., for example – and they’re headed to a society which has been forced to become open and permissive, to deal with the simple matter of survival.

All of the women are determined to experience the world of Italy, yet each of them has issues, back in the States. Libby, for example, has been in the early phases of what she hopes will be a romantic entanglement with the graduate instructor of one of their classes: a handsome, slightly older man named Zach. The entire trip involves the four women having European adventures, meeting or failing to meet young men, and seeking perspective between life in Italy and in the United States.

The second act of the novel is set in 1985. The quartet has decided to meet up in Aspen, where they once studied at the Aspen Music Festival, before that city became the winter resort it now is, to re-establish their friendships, report on their adult lives, and to gain some perspective on their past.

Libby is now a recent divorcee, determined that she is delighted to be on her own. And, who should she encounter at the resort than the celebrated Zach, from whom her earlier parting had always seemed oddly unsatisfying. Perhaps with age and experience, and the push of unexpected meeting, she might give the relationship another thought, although the end of this encounter comes as a total surprise.

The third act finds Libby living back in her home town of Gettysburg, Pa., in 2007. Attending a performance by a string quartet, at one of the universities in that city, who should enter the auditorium but the famed Zach. This time, he and Libby seem poised to establish the relationship which they had never previously been able to form. Or, perhaps not.

Libby is an interesting woman, and her development is believable and stimulates the reader to form his or her own thoughts on what might be the cause of various events.

The author chooses a colorful and interesting vocabulary, and has a gift for telling enough, yet leaving room for some conjecture, as well.

I’m sure that many readers would classify the book under the category of ”Chick Lit,” because it focuses on the behavior and thoughts of women, and male characters are only observed and never known, but I don’t think you need to hunt whales yourself, to enjoy reading ”Moby Dick,” for example.

I found it an interesting read, and I found myself caring about its characters and events.

”Love in Three Acts” was published by Authorhouse, in 2014. It has 246 pages, and is listed with a popular online bookseller for $19.95 in paperbound edition. Find it with ISBN number 978-1-4918-7044-0.

CALL ME ZELDA

Another novel which offers us a woman’s view of the world, although far less successfully than the Crossett book is ”Call Me Zelda,” by Erika Robuck.

In the ”Roaring Twenties,” early in the 20th Century, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were talked about and written about by nearly everyone. Scott was a best selling novelist who was young and very handsome, and who filled his writings with characters who plainly were patterned after himself and his beautiful wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald.

By the 1940s, when the scandals were over and the beautiful, still-young couple had been destroyed by drink and mental instability, much of the world found itself wondering what they had found so enviable in the wild behavior and endless partying of the Fitzgeralds.

Writing in 2013, Robuck seeks to make sense of the same issues to the 21st Century. Her central character is Anna Howard, a psychiatric nurse, who works in a clinic for the mentally ill. By 1932, Zelda Fitzgerald had sunk far into mental illness.

Curiously, she had kept her outstanding good looks, and she had periods in which she could produce the sparkling conversation which had won the hearts of so many young men, and the envy of the women of the world. But, at other times, she clawed at her face and neck, curled up in the corners of rooms, and cursed and swore and seemed to be living in a world which the people around her failed to recognize.

Anna lived a life which seemed to be marked by endless tragedy. Her husband had fought in World War I, but had never returned from the war. He was presumed dead in the fighting, but the possibility of his return keeps her from moving on with her life. The couple’s only child died of an illness at the age of five. Her only brother has become a Roman Catholic Priest, and while he has achieved considerable advancement in the church, he often confides in her his dissatisfaction with elements of the church and his uncertainty about life.

Their mother is wheelchair bound, and their father is showing the signs of old age. Anna needs something to re-focus her life, and when the glamorous Zelda becomes her charge, she becomes too involved in the mercurial and challenging life of the celebrity patient.

For me, the challenge of the book is that Anna is supposed to be a talented and successful medical professional, yet she allows herself to become Zelda’s best friend, advocating not for what she believes is best for the patient, but for the whims of the patient.

By the end of the novel, Anna is driving around the country alone, spending her own money, and checking into hotels and doing things which a woman would not have been allowed to do, by herself, in 1948. All of this is in pursuit of a desire of Zelda’s which her nurse isn’t even sure the patient should have, let alone pursue it herself. Anna lives the life of a modern woman, in a historical period in which that would not have been possible.

That said, the novel focuses on people who are extremely interesting. It is mostly accurate in the portrayal of the Fitzgeralds, and of the people who played important parts in their lives. Probably the greatest historical omission is Scott’s relationship with gossip columnist Sheilagh Graham, while his wife languished in mental hospitals.

The book makes for interesting reading. It would be a great read to take to the beach, or into the backyard hammock to while away a summer afternoon. It just isn’t history.

”Call Me Zelda” has 319 pages in paperbound edition. It was published in 2013 by New American Library, a product of Penguin Publishers. It’s marked for sale at $16, and can be located with ISBN number 978-0-451-23992-1.

NOT MY FATHER’S SON

Scottish-born actor Alan Cumming is one of the most talented actors, singers, dancers, and a variety of other arts-related gifts, in the world today.

He is probably best known by American audiences as the actor who portrays lawyer Eli Gold in the cast of the popular television series ”The Good Wife.”

In 2010, Cumming was approached by the television program ”Who Do You Think You Are?” which each week chose a famous subject, and investigated their family history. Viewers watched while the celebrity was taken to Italy, to the cottage where his great grandparents had lived at the turn of the 20th Century, or to India, where a great great aunt had married into Indian royalty.

Cumming’s maternal grandfather had led a curious life, not unlike the missing husband in ”Call Me Zelda.” He had fought in World War II, and when the war was over, he didn’t return to wife and children, but accepted a posting with the British military in their colony of Malaya, which is now the country of Malaysia. Cumming thought it would be good for his mother to know about the last years of her father’s life, so he agreed to participate in the program. He also knew that he was distantly related to the Thane or Earl of Cawdor, a Scottish nobleman whose ancestor played an important part in Shakespeare’s play ”Macbeth.”

He jokes in his memoir that the show might turn up proof that he himself was entitled to inherit the title.

No sooner was he contractually tied to the program, than he received a very troubling phone call from his only sibling, a brother. The brothers’ father had phoned and claimed that Alan was not his father’s son, but was the product of an affair which his mother had experienced. Now, the actor found himself inescapably bound to a process which might be proving his entire life had been false, and his beloved mother would be humiliated.

The memoir is aptly titled ”Not My Father’s Son,” and it switches back and forth, every few pages, from Cumming’s childhood, to his dealings with the investigative program. The actor and his brother had a horrible childhood. Their father beat them and kicked them, and he often reviled them in front of their friends and neighbors, establishing a mindset in which they had almost no self-respect.

While his brother received plenty of this abuse, and their father’s co-workers were treated much the same, the worst of it all was reserved for Alan. Now, it seemed there might be a reason, though no excuse, for the abuse. He finds himself obsessing over minor issues, such as that his brother, his father, and most of their male relatives had plentiful growths of hair on their chests, while Alan has next to none.

The memoir is riveting, and holds the reader close. The final answer to the central puzzles is held until the climax of the book, but there is no sense of coyness.

Some readers may be dismayed to find that Cumming is married to a man, and has been honored by Queen Elizabeth II for both his performing talents and for his activism on behalf of gay and transgendered rights, but I didn’t find that intrusive into the story, and doubt that most people would find it a problem.

The book was published by Harper Collins in 2014. It has 290 pages, in hardcover edition,and is marked for sale at $26.99. Find it with ISBN number 978-0-06-237980-1.

THE IMITATION GAME

One of the best and most successful films I’ve seen recently is ”The Imitation Game.” It is a thriller about the quest, during World War II Britain, for a way to solve the Nazis’ famous Enigma code.

The Nazis communicated with their troops and especially their submarines, using a secret code, which they called Enigma. In 1940, when Hitler’s troops had conquered nearly all of Europe, between sub polar Norway and the Sahara Desert, Britain was standing alone against the Nazi surge. The United States and Canada were shipping thousands of tons of food and other necessary things to keep Britain from starving, but German submarines were sinking most of those ships.

If Britain could crack the coded messages by which the Germans communicated with their combat units, it would help them deal more successfully with that threat. In fact, historians have estimated that the successful cracking of Enigma probably shortened the war in Europe by two to four years, and saved at least 12 million lives, and probably more than that.

As with many contemporary films and books, the action of the film switches back and forth from the 1940s and the 1950s, when the war had ended, and the code breakers had returned to their normal lives.

The great challenge of Enigma was that it changed, every 24 hours. If code breakers had found five or six letters, and what letters they should be translated as, suddenly those five or six letters had a new equivalent, and all their work was meaningless.

If a German message said ”w-u-l-g,” The code breakers might eventually work out that ”w” should be translated as ”s,” and ”g” should be translated as ”p,” they might eventually determine that the word meant ”ship.” But when midnight arrived, ”w” might now be translated as ”r.”

The code was eventually cracked by Alan Turing, a mathematical genius, who built what has come to be considered one of the first computers, if not the very first computer. The machine was able to try so many combinations of letters that it eventually mastered the German code, and how it changed.

Ironically, if the Germans knew that the British had cracked Enigma, they could simply change it, and force the team to start all over. It was considered necessary to allow enough German attacks to succeed so that they would not guess that their code was broken. Even after the war had ended, the British government believed that the work done by the code breakers needed to be kept top secret, to keep their discoveries from the new enemy: the U.S.S.R., so the people who had probably done more than any other individuals to save lives and end the war remained unknown to their fellow countrymen.

Alternating with the heroic efforts of the team are events from the 1950s, where Turing was working as a Cambridge University professor, and is the victim of a house burglary. Police soon learn that the code breaker is gay, and a stranger he has brought home has done the robbery. Should the hero deal with the vice squad, un protected?

The film was released in November 2014, and was released on DVD on March 31. It has already earned back nearly 20 times its original cost of $14 million.

The film does an excellent job of making a rather dry subject, intensely interesting. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has won an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe nomination, a BAFTA nomination, and many more awards for his portrayal as the thorny Turing.

A deep analysis of humanity, human values, and human behavior is a rare treasure indeed. I hope you’ll see ”The Imitation Game.”

WINKS

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One of the most successful Broadway shows of the past decade will soon be performed in Buffalo by a professional touring company, at Shea’s Performing Arts Center.

”The Book of Mormon,” by the men who produce the television show ”South Park” was such a success in its regular performance in Buffalo, that Shea’s has brought the tour back. Performances will take place Tuesday through June 7, for a total of eight performances.

Shea’s is located at 646 Main St., in downtown Buffalo.