Year: 2010

A MILLION LITTLE PIECES by James Frey


Everyone seems to love this book. Meanwhile, it’s a bit crap.

It’s all about James Frey’s attempt to recover from drug and alcohol addiction. He wakes up on an airplane, with a huge hole in his cheek and missing teeth, and slowly realises he is being flown to his parents, who will put him in rehab. The book tracks his recovery, and his romance with a fellow patient. The cover is full of quotes from reviewers, apparently seriously misled. (Utterly compulsive” “heartbreaking memoir” etc. Maybe they are on crack too). It was also a bestseller.

True is not always interesting. I am sure recovering from drug addiction really sucks, and mostly you think “I hate my life” and “I want drugs” basically all day. As the subject of an entire book however these two thoughts get dull very quickly. Blah blah blah I need crack blah blah blah I have ruined my life blah blah blah I need vodka. You get the picture. It’s only got one colour.

The best part was when he tells us all about how he had two root canals without anaesthetic or painkiller. He couldn’t have drugs because of his addiction, so he just had two tennis balls to hold. He held them so hard he split his fingernails.

Hilariously, your friend and mine Wikipedia tells me that it has emerged that some of the book was invented. Frey apologized for fabricating portions of his book and for having made himself seem “tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am.” He added, “People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. . . . My mistake . . . is writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” This does not surprise me. One very irritating aspect of the book is that he is constantly telling us how tough he is, and how he cows lesser men with his giant penis, (okay I exagerrate) etc etc. His publisher admitted that despite marketing the book as a memoir, and describing it as ‘brutally honest’ she had never had any section of it fact checked. Nice.

IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote


Capote was inspired to write this book by a 300 word article in the New York Times, which began: “Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) — A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged … There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.” (Thanks Salon)

He went down to Holcomb, with his childhood friend (bizarrely: Harper Lee) to interview people, and spent the next six years working on a detailed account of the crime. It is widely credited as the first non-fiction novel, and as more or less inventing the true crime genre. This genre is disgustingly large and healthy now, of course, so the book seems a good deal less radical and remarkable now than it did then.

It’s still however a gripping little story, with well drawn and compelling characters. What most appealed to me was the long sections of direct quotes. It was fascinating to see how ordinary people spoke in 1959. It’s sort of insanely quaint. They all sound like they’re in an Arthur Miller play all the time.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE by Dodie Smith


This is such a wonderful book, I don’t even know what to do with myself. I began it on the train home from Bath in the evening, and suffice to say I finished it all before bed time. You know how it is when you look at the clock and it’s 00:05, and then, ten minutes later it’s 01:20? At that point, you’re sleep schedules all fucked anyway, so you may as well just keep reading! Hurray! It was a total binge.
Though now, as with all the best binges, I’m sorry for it. Because now I have no more I CAPTURE THE CASTLE to read. The cover says: “I know of few novels – except Pride and Prejudice – that inspire as much fierce lifelong affection in their readers as I Capture the Castle.” (Joanna Trollope) And I believe it. The first person I told about having read it practically chewed my arm off in delight, as she loves it too, and she told me it was recommended to her initially in an equally crazed fashion. I looked it up on Amazon, and it has a vast majority of 5 stars. Though three morons who need to smoke less crack gave it 1 star.

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is written in journal format; and that that is successful is a major feat I think. It’s a hard thing to do. That ghost story I read a few books ago was in that format, and it was sadly creaky: the hardy young explorer was bizarrely literary, and kept saying “I write this journal because xyz” in a not very believable way. I CAPTURE THE CASTLE is very successful in this respect. It’s allegedly written by a seventeen year old girl, and not only is the voice itself charming, but, amazingly, it remains believable as she changes and grows over the course of the journal.

The girl, called Cassie, lives in a delipidated old castle with her sister and brother, her stepmother, and her father, who is struggling with his second decade of writers’ block. As their father is not writing, they have almost no income, and while very middle class, are so poor as often to be underfed. The owner of the nearby manor home dies, and his estate passes into the hands of his American nephew Simon. Simon and his cousin Neil arrive, and the former falls wildly in love with Cassie’s sister Rose. Rose is swept up in preparations for the wedding, and only slowly discovers that she does not in fact love her new fiance. In a quite unexpected twist, Cassie falls in love with him too, and this causes much upset. The book captures very well the sort of achingly painful love that is so common in adolesence and, thank god, not so very common afterwards.

There is much that is beautiful in the writing of this book: there’s one bit, about a nightime swim in a moat, that is just gorgeous. There’s a lovely capturing of English countryside too, and a real love of a certain English way of life. It makes me sad blogging about it because I’ve already read it, and there’s no more left.

HANGOVER SQUARE by Patrick Hamilton


This is a fantastic little book. It’s subtitled ‘A story of darkest Earl’s Court,’ and is very much about the misery and anonymity of the big city. It’s certainly not a book to read when you are feeling sick of London, as I am.

Sample: At one point, our protagonist is trying to warm up on a cold day in front of a miserable gas fire. Comments the author, in probably my favourite line of the entire book: “To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court” You said it, baby.

HANGOVER SQUARE tells the story of one Harvey Bone, who is a sweet and slightly simple young man living in Earl’s Court. The year is very specifically 1939, and the war hangs over the entire book. Bone is very lonely, and conceives an obsessive love for one Netta Langdon. She is thoroughly nasty to him, but he hangs onto the edge of her hard drinking social group. Occasionally, Bone hears what is described as a click in his head, and suddenly the world becomes a bit silent and vacant, and he moves as if in a dream. During these periods, he plans to kill Netta. When his head clicks back, he cannot remember these ‘dead’ periods at all. Bone is a thoroughly symmpathetic character, and the book reels you in by continually keeping you in hope that he will come right. He keeps trying to give up drinking, and planning to move out of the city to the countryside, both of which, it is suggested, might yet save him. Eventually, in a particularly bad period, he does kill Netta, and on her friends, and then covers the apartment in lengths of thread, so the crime scene will not be touched by the police. Shortly afterwards, he kills himself. He had been looking after a stray cat, and his suicide note is mostly about making sure the cat is looked after. It is sad.

Hamilton is a bit naughty, as he really makes you hate Netta. I have to admit its a tiny bit mysoginist. Apparently ‘her thoughts resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid . . . she had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action . . .’ You get the picture. You seriously totally don’t care when she gets drowned in her bath.

JB Priestly in the introduction makes the excellent point that Hamilton is one of the first writers to really deal with the way one can be homeless in a big city – homeless in the sense of anonymous, and without any kind of community – just floating. Let me just quote you one other little bit! Speaking of a young man: “For he was alone in London for the fist time, and at an age when the external world generally bears a totally differnet aspect from the one it bears to its more battered and jaundiced inhabitants – at an age, indeed, where even the scenery of SW7 might be associated with the beginning of life rather than the end of all hope, and its streets and people charged with a remarkable mystery and romance of their own.”

Fantastic.

DARK MATTER by Michelle Paver

I needed to read this for a job I have. It is a ghost story, and a pretty successful one, judging by the fact that I had to sleep with the lights on for three days after. Either it’s pretty good or I’m a pretty big wuss. It’s about an expedition in the 1930s to the Arctic. Once the sun disappears entirely for the winter, they start seeing a man who walks the shore near their cabin. Nothing much more than that happens, there’s not much gore, but it’s still impressively scary.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT by Jeanette Winterson


This book begins charmingly. It is unpretentious and seemingly honest; and rather sweet. It’s about a little girl growing up with an exceedingly religious mother. As she grows, the little girl begins to realise she is a lesbian, with predictable results as respects the mother.

It seems quite a common or garden coming out story to me, but I think at the time it was very new subject matter. Thus the fame?

It all goes a bit wrong at the end, for me anyway, when she starts inserting sections of a rather naff and quite fakey fairy tale into the story.

I sort of love the introduction. Many thanks for typing out this extract to A Literal Girl Blog

“Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was written during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. I was 24. At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion for coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer…the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.”

PIED PIPER by Nevil Shute


My cousin gave me this to read on the plane last week. I was glad to see it. I’ve only ever read one other Shute – when I was about fourteen – ON THE BEACH, which made a really big impact on me (in the way things do much more often at fourteen than at thirty three). Essentially, it tells the story of a bunch of people waiting on a beach in Australia for the nuclear cloud that has obliterated the rest of the world to float towards them. I loved it. So much so, that I’m scared to re-read it in case I don’t love it anymore. Anyway, PIED PIPER makes me feel I could go back to the BEACH, because I really like it too.

It tells the story of an elderly British man who decides to go to France for a spot of fishing. Not too much to make a novel out of there, except that the year is 1940, and Germany is very much on the move. Once he’s been there for a little while, it begins to look more likely that France will fall, the man decides to leave for London, and another guest at the hotel asks him to take their children (aged 5 and 8) with him. He agrees, thinking that this will entail simply a train ride to the coast, and then the ferry – a journey of less than 24 hours.

Unfortunately, on the way, one of the children becomes ill, so they are forced to wait in a hotel. By the time they can leave they are having to constantly change their travel plans, as word reaches them of this or that train or port shutting down as the Germans advance. You get very much the sense of what it would really have been like to be in France at this time: everything is based on rumours and surmise, and no one thinks for a minute that Paris will actually fall, until it really does. Eventually, he is reduced to walking with the children, while the roads are machinegunned, and attempting to keep his nationality a secret to avoid arrest and internment by the Germans. As they proceed, they pick up other lost or abandoned children on the way, till he eventually is looking after five children.

We learn that the reason he chose such an odd time to go on a French holiday was because his son was killed in the very early days of the war, and he spends much of the book trying to come to terms with the loss. He does eventually get all the children to safety, and, in a beautifully handled parallel arc, comes to accept the death of his own child.

This is a cleanly and intelligently written page turner with lots of heart. It kept me up till 3am finishing it, which I do not think was just the jetlag.

JOY IN THE MORNING by PG Wodehouse


I’ve been meaning to read some Wodehouse for ages, and this was it: JOY IN THE MORNING.

It is the fourth of Wodehouse’s eleven wildly popular Jeeves and Wooster stories. Bertie Wooster is a dim but wealthy gentleman living in London in the 1930s. Jeeves is his butler, who is very much the brains of the operation, and is constantly having to get Wooster out of what I can only describe as – this being a nineteen thirties comic novel – scrapes. In JOY IN THE MORNING, Bertie has to go down to Steeple Bumpleigh, the home of his terrifying aunt, to help his friend secure the hand of the girl he loves. There’s all sorts of hijinks (I use the word advisedly), involving explosions, fancy dress balls, boy scouts and drunken uncles, and eventually Jeeves saves the day.

In general, I love these establishment English Lit figures. This is no doubt because I have been so colonized mentally, and Bob Marley would be ashamed of me. Thus, I expected to love Wodehouse. I’m really sorry to say that this is not the case. It all seemed horribly overwritten – every sentence was crammed to the brim with ironic, slangy language; and the comic idea (idiot rich man, clever servant) seemed rather old hat. It might only seem old hat now of course, because Wodehouse was the milliner who first made this particular hat, and now we’ve seen it repeated over and over.

So perhaps while it does appear derivative, it is only derivative of itself. Whatever. I was bored.

As a side point, JOY IN THE MORNING alludes to Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Which I think is rather lovely. And interesingly, the title has actually been used for two other novels. You must just read the write-up for the 1950s one below, especially if you want to barf:

“In Brooklyn, New York, in 1927, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law to marry him. Little did they know how difficult their first year of marriage would be, in a faraway place with little money and few friends. But Carl and Annie come to realize that the struggles and uncertainty of poverty and hardship can be overcome by the strength of a loving, loyal relationship. An unsentimental yet uplifting story, Joy in the Morning is a timeless and radiant novel of marriage and young love.”

Barf.

FREE FOR FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee


This is the story of one Casey Han. Her parents moved from Korea to America to escape the troubles there in the aftermath of the war, and have provided her with a solid upbringing in Queens. She received a scholarship to Princeton, and the story tells of her attempts to find a job and a happy relationship as she grows into her twenties.

It’s enjoyably Victorian, which a giant cast and lots of interweaving plots, and maintains your interest, if not your sympathy, throughout. The main character is always re-reading MIDDLEMARCH, and I will eat my bra (and its got a LOT of underwire) if the author is not a great lover of the Victorians.

Actually, I’ve often noticed that immigrants are fond of the Victorian style (another example is Vikram Seth’s A SUITABLE BOY, the first book of this blog), and you may not be surprised to learn that I’ve got a theory about it. It’s this. Ready?

Now, you can’t play variations on a theme until you know what the theme is. Or: you can’t remix a track that doesn’t exist. European and American writers can have a fine compempt for narrative, and for character; they can mix it up and spit it out all they like, because the basic narratives in which they live have all been formed already. Thus they can mix and remix. They can be modern, and post-modern, and tear the Victorian novel apart, because they already have the Victorian novel. A lot of people from outside this tradition, however, have never really had their stories told. Thus, they need plot, and character, so their grandchildren can rip them all up. They need to write their own Victorian novels.

It’s kind of the same thing with modern art. You can’t mess with the visual world until you’ve agreed what the world looks like.

I can’t think that I’ve ever read a book as absolutely immersed in consumer culture as this one is. Casey has a bizarre sense that the world has somehow treated her unfairly, because she is not as wealthy as some of her fellow students at Princeton. She honestly seems to consider herself poor, and, also bizarrely, the author seems to agree with this anaylsis. This is a book in which not being able to afford 500 count Egyptian cotton sheets is regarded as being a genuinely difficult thing, for which Casey deserves sympathy. It makes it a little hard to relate to.

Eventually, Casey decides to go to business school (irritatingly referred to as B school throughout), and the world of business is written about with such familiarity that I think I learn a little something about the author’s background, and about why the absence of 500 count sheets might be perceived as such a problem.

I just googled her, and if you look here you’ll see I won’t be needing to eat my bra.

CHARITY GIRL By Georgette Heyer


Georgette Heyer is an author of historical romances, usually set in the Regency period. Her novels are comic and well-plotted, and remind one for obvious reasons of Jane Austen. They don’t remind one too much however, as Austen is a great writer, while poor Heyer is more in the trying hard department. But! She’s charming and fun, and I loved her when I was in my early teens, so I was quite pleased to find her in another camping site’s book exchange.

It was a tiny bit of a letdown. It’s still funny and sweet, but I’m afraid my 33 year old self can see that it’s also horribly overwritten, and rather cynically plotted. Also, I don’t think anybody in any period speaks with quite as much period detail as her characters do. For example: I should like to know ma’am, what the dev – deuce – you mean by setting the servants to spy on me? By God, I think it beats the Dutch! I’ll say what I dashed well choose” etc etc and etc.

She was on the best-seller lists consistently from when she was seventeen though, for which I give her mad props. Note that CHARITY GIRL was first published in 1970, and my copy is the ninth edition, published 1981 (charmingly, it’s price was £1.50)

Apprently she was quite contemptuous of what she did, which I find rather sad. In 1943, speaking of a new novel of hers she said: “Spread the glad tidings that it will not disappoint Miss Heyer’s many admirers. Judging from the letters I’ve received from obviously feeble-minded persons who do so wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes. I think myself I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense, but it’s questionably good escapist literature and I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter, or recovering from flu. Its period detail is good; my husband says it’s witty—and without going to these lengths, I will say that it is very good fun.” More here.