Year: 2019

FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kusher


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I really didn’t like this book very much, which surprised me, because it was heavily recommended by the author Jonathan Franzen, and usually I love everything he suggests (e.g., THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN).  This though I found just mostly lame.  It is about an American girl in the 1970s who ends up with a much older Italian man. She is interested in being a conceptual artist, and in motorbikes, and finds herself going to Italy to try and break a land speed record.  Somehow she ends up in some social unrest and gets dumped. 


While I can see why many critics admired it, I can also see why some panned it.  I saw one describe it as “macho,” which I thoroughly agree with.  It also has a very common and very annoying figure in contemporary literature, which is the protagonist who kind of drifts around without any agency.  There was also a terrible chapter where the author thought she better let us know that the rubber for the motorcycle tires came from oppressed people in the Amazon.  Embarrassingly for this section she changes to the second person present tense. In addition to everything else, I very much fear the author thinks indigenous people live in the moment.  Cringe.

CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY by Edith Wharton

Nothing can compare with Wharton’s great novels, AGE OF INNOCENCE and ETHAN FROMME,  which are wonderful, terrifying novels about how easy it is to waste a life. 

This one however is pretty good, and certainly very contemporary.  It tells the story of one Undine Spragg, a gold digger who succeeds in digging an awful lot of gold, only to find out that her reward is an overwhelming desire for more or better gold.  She is from a nouveau riche Midwestern family, and ruthlessly marries her way up the New York social scale. 
I was really struck by the character of her first husband, an idealistic young man she betrays extensively.  We are clearly supposed to feel sorry for him, especially when he kills himself in despair.  But frankly, it was hard to do.  The only reason she could betray him so utterly was because he did not know the first thing about her as a person.  All he was interested in was her pretty face.  And surely that is a lesson as old as time: chasing the pretty girl comes with problems.  Also, it stretched credulity.  Who kills themselves because they were cheated on?  Like eat some ice-cream, go out with your friends, and get over it.   
Side point, here is a picture of me actually reading it, in Zimbabwe. I was occasionally disturbed by impala.

HOLIDAYS ON ICE by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not a very happy period, where I read David Sedaris very intensively.  I finished the majority of his books in a two week period.  This one I picked up when I was on a mini-break in Barcelona, and was facing the daunting prospect of a day at the beach without anything to read. Clear recipe for existential crisis: sun, sea, and my own thoughts.  So I borrowed this from my host’s bookcase, who while Spanish apparently reads in both French and English. 

By far the best of the short stories here is Sedaris’ famous SANTALAND DIARIES, that chronicles his time as an elf at Macy’s Christmas grotto.  Let me quote extensively, just because I feel like it:
I came home this afternoon and checked the machine for a message from UPS but the only message I got was from the company that holds my student loan, Sallie Mae. Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. It scares me.
The woman at Macy’s asked, “Would you be interested in full-time elf or evening and weekend elf?”
I said, “Full-time elf.”
I have an appointment next Wednesday at noon.
I am a thirty-three-year-old man applying for a job as an elf.
I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, “Thank you so much,” and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don’t know what you have but I hope I never catch it. This afternoon on Lexington Avenue I accepted a leaflet from a man dressed as a camcorder. Hot dogs, peanuts, tacos, video cameras, these things make me sad because they don’t fit in on the streets. In a parade, maybe, but not on the streets. I figure that at least as an elf I will have a place; I’ll be in Santa’s Village with all the other elves. We will reside in a fluffy wonderland surrounded by candy canes and gingerbread shacks. It won’t be quite as sad as standing on some street corner dressed as a french fry.
Unfortunately, as this is an early collection, it also includes a format Sedaris has since wisely abandoned, which is fiction.  These stories are not great.  But the memoir pieces are amazing.  He basically invented the lightly comic personal essay as a genre, and is its undisputed king. 
In depressing news, in googling my own blog to figure out when I was on my Sedaris binge, I also found that the book of his I read last, THEFT BY FINDING, which I had remembered as recent was in fact two years ago.  Time only flies like that when you are either 1) having fun or 2) getting old.  Let’s hope in this case it is both

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FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This novel, a NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, appeared on so many of various news and social media feed that I sort of put off reading it.  No one likes the hard sell.  Or the feeling that the algorithms have profiled your preferences so exactly to find you content you will like.  But eventually I broke down and bought it.  And alright robot overlords I admit it!  It is content that I like.
The novel tells the story of Toby Fleishman, who is getting divorced.  He has joint custody and a lot of anger issues.  He is just discovering the world of dating apps.  Then his ex-wife disappears and his life takes a downward (or is it upward?) turn. Primarily what I liked was the sharply comic turn of phrase.  How’s this:

Toby had been told all his life that being in love means never having to say you’re sorry.  But no, it was actually being divorced that meant never having to say you’re sorry

Or this:

 People under forty had optimism.  They had optimism for the future; they didn’t accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity.

Or this, about a hospital

Being at the hospital was like being inside the future, but as it was imagined by science fiction films in the last part of the twentieth century, not the actual future we ended up with, where everything just turned out being smaller and flimsier than it used to be

Or here, an offhand description of some man:

 It was unclear if he knew about his blackhead situation 

This is more than enough to keep the novel enjoyable.  The actual story, and its larger themes, were maybe not quite so successful.  Basically, the novel is interested in exploring the idea of midlife and marriage, and especially what happens when one partner stays at home.  Apparently, we all get very unhappy and most of us are having affairs.  This I didn’t quite follow.  First of all, it’s not my experience.  I know lots of happy married people.  Second, all the characters wealthy. The central character is a doctor on $200K annually, which is apparently not enough for that social set, and he is rather a figure of pity, though as he tells us – “ .. . he’d gone into his field at a time when doctors could still be respected” –  ie., before the rise and rise of the banker and the consultant.
Perhaps money really can’t buy happiness, but can buy unhappiness?   This is also not my experience.   I have no data set to advise on this one.  But the book is very much about women, and there I do have some experience.  The thrust of the book is very much that

The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older

And apparently this is like a truth we all have to live with. I mean I really don’t get it. The older I get, the more trouble I seem able to cause.  So I realy don’t understand all the suffering.  But I get that for certain women with a lot of money, who want a  lot more money, and don’t have jobs, the struggle is real.  It’s hard not to sound dismissive.  But you know, get a job.  Then you won’t have time to worry about if you are sexy enough. 

MY LIVES by Edmund White

In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness.  

Of course I’d learned the word from her.

Such is the very excellent beginning of this memoir of the life of author Edmund White.  I learnt something in this book about writing, and something about psychotherapy, but mostly I learnt that there was a period after the sexual revolution and before AIDS where a certain generation had a truly incredibly amount of sex.  And I mean, like really at lot.  Like, I can’t tell if I believe it, but then I guess there wasn’t that much on TV. 
As a side bar, let me just say how typical I think this is of this generation.  They basically lucked out: no war, no Depression, just rising house prices and access to birth control.  They took an absolute flame thrower to the environment, to the European Union, and to the notion that parents want a better life for their children.  If there is one thing we have learnt about this generation, it’s that they will vote for themselves absolutely no matter what, and god help those coming after them.  After Brexit, I don’t even like to give up my seat on the tube for an old person.  I am so ready for the revolution.
Revolution aside, back to Edmund White.  Unusually this book is organized not chronologically but by various themes ‘My Mother,’ ‘My Shrinks,’ ‘My Friends,’ and similar.  As so often in memoirs (regular readers will know I am on a memoir kick) the childhood is the most vivid part.  I wonder why this is? I have two hypothesis 1) Because you are just learning about life when you are young, it strikes you as more wonderful/memorable/unique; or 2) Because you are further away from it you have had more time to shape it into legend. 
I tend to think it is 2).  But in any case, White has a particularly interesting childhood, in the dubious position of ‘best friend’ to his divorced mother.  He spends a lot of time in therapy, trying to be cured of his homosexuality.  His therapist blames the parents (fully agreed; certainly nothing I’ve ever done has been my fault).  However, as Edmund points out:

They were as eccentric as he – impoverished rural Texans unprepared for the world they’d created for themselves by earning money and moving North . . . they were self-made crazy people, all too full of dangerous feelings.

This was not a bad thing in his view, as he observes:

Some children complain because their parents fight or are divorced, without realizing the most neglected people of all are the offspring of love marriages.  A husband and wife besotted with each other look at their children as annoying interlopers.

I’ve often thought this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen someone else mention it.  He gives his parents other weird free passes too.  Try this:

My father did try to seduce my sister, who many years later remembered that Daddy had come on to her when she was thirteen or fourteen.  He’d tried to kiss her and fondle her.  She’d said, ‘No Daddy, that’s not right.”  She’d been a bit proud that she appealed to him – after all, our mother had often spoken of the elaborate ruses she’d imagined to reawaken his sexual attachment to her.

  ?!?!?!

White is clearly a writer, and the book is full of interesting observations, such as  “. . . later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glen Miller – few people were avant-garde outside their own domain” and  “New York is a city of foreign accents in which no one ever asks someone where he is from except out of hostility or as a form of flirtation.”
But mostly this book is about sex.  He will describe someone by their height, and their eye colour, or whatever, so-far-so-standard, but this is the only book I’ve ever read where people are also routinely described by their GENITALS.  Sample: 

 I remember Jim had a long, thin cock and very warm balls.

I guess it makes sense.  It must be so super weird for boys that all their junk is on the outside, instead of where it should be, and is for girls, safely on the inside, nicely protected from things. 
The book gets bogged down in later pages in some serious name-dropping, in which he greatly overestimates how impressed we will be by how Foucault used to act at cocktail parties.  However I still enjoyed it, as a window into what it was like to get to be in the generation that has burned the house down.

GROWING UP by Russell Baker

The straightforward title of this memoir is a good clue to what’s inside.  Basically, he tells you all about how he grew up.  It gives you a different perspective on modern memoirs, where people feel that they have to have interior dramas and unique personal problems.  Baker tells us very little about his interior life, and focuses almost entirely on other people.  It was refreshing, and makes me wonder about our current modern mindset.  The idea that I might not be the centre of my own life is somehow sort of a relief.  Perhaps our focus on self-improvement and self-care is a symptom of an unhealthy modern self-absorption.

He grows up in a working class home during the Depression.  Times are tough, but family bonds are strong.  His mother is determined he makes something of himself and in many ways the book is her story more than his.  An example of what I mean by times are tough is his paper route.  Lots of ten year old kids have paper routes, but his happens at 2am in a bad part of Baltimore.  Apparently this is fine, because he gets two dollars. 

The book begins in fact with his mother, who is in hospital as an old woman:

Of my mother’s childhood and her people, of their time and place, I knew very little.  A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs.  . . . Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and their children, and children in general, and about the disconnections between children and parents that prevent them from knowing each other.  Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. 

I suspect this book is written in part for his children.  I am not sure how much they will appreciate the extensive detail on how he hooked up with their mum.  Essentially when he meets her she works behind the make-up counter, and while he is quite crazy about her he doesn’t think she is ‘good enough’ to be his wife.  I am not sure why he is so sniffy, as he is the one with the background in dangerous child labour.  In any case, this lady breaks up with him after three years, because she realizes it isn’t going anywhere.  He manages to hold off calling her for a heroic three weeks or so.  Master stroke on her side, she then goes on a business trip with some men.  Then he really loses his mind.  Here is their romantic proposal when she returns.  It’s 7am at the train station café:

“I was going to say I’ve been thinking while you were away,” I said.

“I did some thinking too.” 

“Well, what I was thinking was, maybe it’s time I started thinking about getting married.” 

“Do you have somebody in mind?” 

“Are you still interested in getting married?” I asked 

“We’ve covered all this a hundred times.  I’m tired of it.” 

“Would you like to get married?” 

“To who?” 

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, say it,” she said. 

“Let’s get married.” 

“After the Sun raises you to eighty dollars a week?” 

“As soon as you want to. I’ve been figuring, and think we can get by on seventy dollars a week, if you promise to quit charging things in department stores.” 

“Would I have to live with your mother?” 

“That’s a hell of a question.” 

“I just want to know whether I’m going to have a husband or a mother’s boy.” 

“Do you want to fight or do you want to get married?” 

“Is March too soon?” she replied. 

I suppose I gasped.  March was only eight weeks away. It seemed terrifyingly immediate.  “March is fine with me,” I said. 

Mimi reached across the table and took my hand.“Kiss me,” she said.

Anyway they made it to their 65th wedding anniversary, so something went right. 

This book won the Pulitzer and sold 22 million copies.  Not all of those 22 million readers were happy.  I got this book used on Amazon, and I do love a yellowing dog-eared copy.  I especially love this one, as it was clearly owned by a teenage boy.  He adds after the various review quotes:

 This book sucks! Ken Johnson

He also reveals something I am sure would embarrass him today.  In a smart move he writes it in a foreign language:  

Ich liebe Sara Welch sehr viel

In a horrifying show of Google power, I was able to establish in about five minutes based on these names and where this book came from that Ken and Sara may be people who attended Clark High School in Las Vegas in the early 90s.  Truly, Big Brother is here and he is us. 

SPANDAU: THE SECRET DIARIES by Albert Speer

I found this in my father’s bookcase.  It is diaries written during Speer’s twenty years spent in jail after the second World War.  It’s one thing when you have just your regular crimes, but Speer was in for crimes against humanity.  I mean, how many people in high school ever think: I’m going to be famous for crimes against humanity?  It must come as a surprise, after the fact, because while you are busy being crazy you probably never think your behaviour rises to anything beyond but I-did-what-I had-to.
This is certainly Speer’s argument.  He was a highly ambitious, but not highly successful, architect when he met Hitler.  Hitler offered him the opportunity to build buildings for his thousand year Reich.  I’ve heard of the thousand year Reich, but always thought it was propaganda.  Apparently not – he genuinely thought this was what he was creating.  Eventually Speer became Minister of Armaments, and was thus crucial to the Nazi war effort. 
While other Nazis (I guess you could call them smart Nazis) ran away in the last days of the war, Speer stayed around, not thinking the Nuremberg trials would go bad for him.  After all, it was a war, and etc.  The judges didn’t look kindly on his use of forced labour (also called slavery) in the armaments factories, and he was sentenced to twenty years.  (Interesting side point: unlike the Allies, Germany refused to use women in its factories, preferring slaves.  Morality aside, how dumb is that?  Obviously slaves will sabotage you every chance they get, versus your wives who you would at least assume are on your side)
His twenty years he has to serve with seven other leading Nazis. You would think he would think he might find that comforting, but this turns out to be pretty much like it would be for anyone condemned to spend decades with their work colleagues, right after a business went bankrupt.  There is a lot of re-fighting the war, and trying to argue that more submarines would have made a difference, or more Aryan purity or whatever. 
Speer also wrestles a lot with how he got there.  Here he is on when he first saw Hitler:

Students had taken me along to a mass meeting on Berlin’s East Side.  Under leafless trees young people in cheap clothes poured towards one of the big beer halls in Berlin’s Hasenheide.  Three hours later I left that same beer garden a changed person.  I saw the same posters on the dirty advertising columns, but looked at them with different eyes.  A blown-up picture of Adolf Hitler in a martial pose that I had regarded with a touch of amusement on my way there  had suddenly lost all its ridiculousness. 

He spends a lot of time trying to explain the appeal.  He also tries to excuse himself, claiming he didn’t know the Holocaust was happening.  For example:

(Hilter) was capable of tossing off quite calmly, between the soup and the vegetable course, ‘I want to annihilate the Jews in Europe.  This war is the decisive confrontation between National Socialism and world Jewry.’ .. That was how he used to talk, in military conferences and at table.  And the entire circle . . . and I myself, all of us would sit there looking grave and gloomy.  . . . No one ever contributed a comment; at most someone would sedulously put in a word of agreement.

He claims that when Hitler said exterminate, he didn’t know he meant ‘exterminate.’  Just like you can say you will crush your enemies but don’t mean ‘crush’.  I wasn’t quite sure how to take all this, as he went on about this for quite some time (and let’s face it he had a lot of time to go on about things, like about twenty years).  Wikipedia tells me I shouldn’t trust a word of it and that there is evidence he knew very well what was going on, and indeed helped build the camps.  Though no one claims he was actively involved in what happened there.
It was interesting to read this book and try and understand how far it is a cynical effort at self-promotion and how far a genuine effort to explain how he got to where he was.  Also very interesting – probably more interesting – was seeing how someone deals with twenty years of nothing.  I don’t think I’ve ever quite understood how long twenty years is, or what prison truly means, before I read this book.  Death is obviously the end of life, but in so far as life is just a series of experiences, you can see how prison is the next best thing to death, because it really does deprive you of experiences. 
It reminded me of (strange bedfellows alert) Nelson Mandela’s LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, where you see how prisoners will create drama and event out of nothing.  For example, Speer starts doing long walks back and forth in the prison yard every day, and then gets an Atlas, so he can imagine that he is walking around the globe.  He writes about it as if he is really in India, or wherever, and in the end of his dairies focuses very much on how much he ‘hopes he can make it to Guadalajara’ before he is let out. He is eventually given a garden, and this transforms his life.  He is there so long that he plants tree seedlings knowing he will live to sit in their shade.  He’s probably a monster, but damn, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. 

THE BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler

This is one of those books that was so original it now seems an imitative.  That is, fifty years ago it created a genre, and now looks like a rather stale example of that genre.  (A bit like this).  The genre: hard-boiled detective, ice-cold blonde, straight-up bourbon, etc.  Here’s the opening:

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothillsI was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them.  I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. 

BOOM!  it’s a murder mystery, but the plot is not really here nor there, so let’s not bother with it.  Chandler didn’t: a chauffeur gets murdered at the beginning, and it’s not clear who did it; and when the movie came to be made, Chandler admitted he didn’t know himself who the culprit was. That’s not the point.  The point is drinking whiskey and being cool.  There’s lots of men facing off.  Here is what he says to one man pointing a gun at him:

“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail”

Or here are some orchids:

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

Chandler had an interesting life, and only got round to this, his first and most famous novel when he is 51.  This gives me hope for my own life.  Before that he did all sorts, military, corporate work.  From the latter “he was dismissed for a combination of factors, including heavy drinking, depression, missed work, and general womanizing.”   I mean, if you have to get fired, that is #goals way to get fired. 

GIVING UP THE GHOST by Hilary Mantel

I am on a memoir kick at the moment, all handpicked for me out of here.  This one is by a famous writer, Hilary Mantel (author of e.g., WOLF HALL).  It’s not much about her fame, or writing, but more about her rather mysterious inner life.  It has the gorgeous language I expect of her: my blog tells me I’ve read fully five (!) of her books.  She really is the master of transforming the ordinary into the marvellous. Here she is walking up to her back door in the dark:

 But just as feet know the path, fingers know the keys.  Fifty yards from the market place there is no light pollution, no urban backwash to pale the sky; no light path, no footfall.  There is starlight, frost on the path, and owls crying from three parishes

The book has three main focuses: her childhood, her illness, and bizarrely the process of buying her house.  She grew up in a working class family, and is one of that group of English writers whose whole life was changed by passing the 11+ exam.  It’s all very hard scrabble, especially the part where her mother leaves her husband for another man but they all continue to live together, but not in a cool menage-a-trois kind of way, more in an economic necessity kind of way. 

Then she goes to university and gets married, but this is largely summarized in a couple of lines.  The main focus is on her illness.  She has endometriosis, which is famously an under-diagnosed disease among women.  It’s still so today, but back then it was really bad: they sent her to a lunatic asylum rather than believe her symptoms. (I said it was better today, but not a lot better.  Ladies: if you have really bad period pain don’t let anyone tell you it’s not really bad).   

Now, all that said, let me clarify that I’m not saying she’s not crazy.   There are some pretty questionable parts.  She was very frightened once when she saw something creepy in the garden when she was eight.  It’s not clear what it was, possibly a ghost, possibly just a quality of the light, but she emphasizes repeatedly how frightening this was.  I would never tell people about such a thing.  I’m just not ready for the mockery.  Same with the last memoir, about the aunt who was just too charismatic.  I’m beginning to conclude that writing a good memoir means not worrying about mockery.

And now onto the third section, the most profoundly British section, which is all about house buying.  Weirdly, this is also about ghosts.  I enjoyed this view of your past homes:

You come to this place, mid-life.  You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face.  When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led.  All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been.  The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of your curtains, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer liners. 

She moves to a new housing estate, and I enjoyed her account of her young neighbours:

They were not . . . the sort for adulterous upsets, for drunken fumbles, for spring folie, for subterfuge and lies.  They were grounded infotec folk, hardware or software people. .  They were mobile in their habits till their children fixed them; keen, pragmatic, willing to defer gratification . . . Men and women met each other halfway, gentle fathers and defined, energetic mothers. . . They had parents, but they had them as weekend accessories, appearing on summer Saturdays like their barbecue forks 

 Her endometriosis, being treated very late, means she can’t have children, and these almost-children also haunt the book. 

Even adulterers have their ghost children. Illicit lovers say: what would our child be like?  Then, when they have parted or are forced apart, the child goes on growing up, a shadow, a half-shadow of possibility.  The country of the unborn is criss-crossed by the roads not taken, the paths we turned our back on.  In a sly state of half-becoming, they lurk in the shadowland of chances missed.

So GIVING UP THE GHOST is an unusual memoir, in not being just the story of her life, but the story of all the lives she didn’t get to lead.  It’s sad really, it seems unfair: how come we only get to live the one life.  Seems like we should get a second chance.