Year: 2024

LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish

Here is a book about growing up on an Iowa farm in the Great Depression.  The New York Times put this on its notable books list of 2007 (I’m going in order from 2000 through those lists, truly I am desperate for something to read), but myself I had to quit half way through.  Essentially the author tells us about all the cooking and cleaning and farming stuff that happened on a farm in the 1930s. You’d think it would be interesting: but no.  Though I will include this snippet:

“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.  Nobody would have been interested.  We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound.”

Yikes.  There’s given children independence and then there is germs.

TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian

I was really impressed by this one.  It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race.  A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter.  Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband.  There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.

What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white.  For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster.  The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault.  It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy.  I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it. 

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary.  This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties).  They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers.  I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest. 

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot.  He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys.  He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will. 

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context.  Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’.  Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts.  I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK.  At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’.  They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage.  To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship!  Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex.  He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him.  It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before. 

PRAIRIE FIRES: THE AMERICAN DREAMS OF LAURA INGALLS WILDER by Caroline Fraser

Here is a life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.  First thing I’m going to say is, there’s a lot of encouragement here for late bloomers.  She wrote that book, and the six others, all in her 60s, with little previous writing experience.  What I found particularly interesting was that they are all – to some extent, and the extent is quite contested – auto-biographical stories, covering her life up to about age 20.   She wrote the books in part to make money, and in part because she was driven to. 

She had a real yearning to keep her parents and her childhood alive.  It was so bad that at night she often could not sleep, because the memories were coming back to her so thick and fast.  I guess it makes sense, as you get older, this desire to make it all mean something.  I find it quite touching, that apparently today you can go to various museums and see things like ‘Pa’s fiddle,’ and ‘Carrie’s sampler.’  How incredible: this low income, rural woman of the early 1900s has managed to immortalize her ordinary family. 

I think one reason she felt such a need to hold onto the past was down to how quickly it was changing in her own lifetime.  Her father was one of those who went out to ‘settle’ the West, so she had a front row seat to what that meant for the native Americans, and lived to see the prairies ploughed under and highways built.  I knew that frontier life was hard, and that very few settlers managed to stay on the land for the five years needed to ‘claim’ it.  But what astounded me was to learn that even in the early 1900s the government meterologists warned repeatedly that the prairies were too dry for small scale farming, and that only cattle would really work.  But the railways still pushed this dream on people.   It is just wild to think of the myth of the noble frontiersman and include in that the fact that he was basically being snookered by big business.  Wilder’s family had a terrible time. If it was not droughts, it was locusts (as many as a trillion individuals in one particular swam).  And once they had ploughed up the prairie, and taken the top soil that took thousands of years to develop, then there came the dust.   Apparently carts would go past with ‘In god we trusted in Kansas we busted,’ on the side, and ‘shack-whacky’ was a well known term for the mental health crises that were common in this difficult environment.   The only real solution was co-operative irrigation and government bailouts, which is yet another layer to the myth of the frontier. 

I can’t even get into her daughter, who was another whole topic, an early journalist who travelled the world, a depressive, and eventually a anti-Semitic libertarian.  A great book, it made me think about a ton of different topics.

DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith

Here is an eerie story of the near-future.  Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies.  They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned.  The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned.  It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good.  Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage.  It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it.  Try this:

“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line.  He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.” 

One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged.  I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away.  A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc.  Various versions of daddy issues in other words.  But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized. 

AN HONEST WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SEX WORK by Charlotte Shane

Here is some non-fiction about being a sex worker.  What I really can’t get is the cover: it’s a sexy pair of female lips.  What?  Who agreed to this image, which to me at least is both cheesy and reductive?

For a book all about the author’s experience, I felt I learnt curiously little about the author.  For example, it’s not clear why she gets into ‘full service,’  For a relatively well-off, well-educated person, it’s an unusual career choice, being simultaneously high-risk and repetitive, but we don’t hear too much about it.  Mostly, she seems to have enjoyed the validation of being sexually desired by so many.   

Another example is her relationship with her main client, who was about half her income.  She tells us a lot about him, including that she would not have spent time with him for free ‘either platonically or sexually,’ but still, she is greatly upset by his death.  

Of most interest to me was her time in high school.  She becomes enamoured of a group of kids at  neighbouring school, and especially of the boys:

“My objective as a teenagers was to find the boys, to link up with them because they were the party, they were the event. Years passed, and the objective stayed the same, with the focus shifted to sanction my own creativity: find boys to make a band, find boys to make a movie – find boys because they’d supply the verbs that would propel my life.  It wasn’t just that they were necessary for sex or romance, though they were for me.  More than that, they were the only means of getting at all that life has to offer.  . . . A woman’s life is fundamentally inert, no matter how busy or accomplished a woman might be because that the nature of an object, even important or well travelled objects like the Hope Diamond or the Olympic Torch . . . I could fling myself into a situation like a skydiver jumping from a plane, but in my mind, I couldn’t forment the situation on my own . . .”

Unpleasantly, I sort of recognize this problem from my own adolescence, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it described so clearly before.

NEVER SAW ME COMING by Tanya Smith

I read this book in a single day on the beach.  It’s my favourite kind of reading, when your own life stays at a respectful distance.  This is the jaw-dropping true story of a young black woman in 1970s Minnesota who figures out how to defraud banks, stealing multiple millions of dollars before she is finally caught. 

This is pretty much all SPOILER ALERT.  Get this: she is in HIGH SCHOOL when she figures out how to move money between banks using the phone.  Then, even more impressively, she manages to con a bank into giving her a computer terminal, convinces their IT department to set it up, and then is able to move money around in the bank’s own systems.  Reminder: it is the 1970s! She is 17!  She is running a sophisticated electronic fraud from her parents’ attic!

Then she starts to do things that are more like what a 17 year old would do, that is, fall for the wrong guy, and give him all the money, so he can ‘invest for their future.’  She hardly sees a penny of her own crime.  She moves to LA, and then to Atlanta, repeating this pattern with two other men.  In her late 20s she is caught, but the police in Minneapolis tell her they don’t believe a ‘Negro’ could possibly be running a scheme of this complexity.  Eventually they are able to see past their own prejudice far enough to get a conviction, and she is given a 13 year sentence, which is far in excess of guidance for white collar crimes. 

She escapes jail twice, once returning to one of these men who chains her up and beats her, forcing her to carry on the scams.  She gives birth in jail twice, only seeing these children on the day of their birth (I had no idea the prison system was this cruel).  She then manages to argue her own legal case for a reduction of sentence, finally getting out.   And this all before she is 40! 

SHEEP’S CLOTHING by Celia Dale

This book absolutely shivers with a detailed understanding of lower middle class London life.  Try this, the first paragraph:

“Two women stood outside in the shadow of the overhang from the walkway above, for Mrs Davies lived on the ground floor of a block of council flats; a mixed blessing, for although it meant she had no stairs to cope with and need never worry whether the lift had been put out of order yet again, she was a sitting target for hit-and-run bell-ringers, letterbox rattlers, window-bangers and dog dirt. And worse.  So far she had been lucky, but she knew better than not to keep her door on the chain.”

It’s banging.  I saw this writer described as ‘Austen but with murder,’ and this is a better description than any I can come up with.  It’s very clean, contained, comic writing, but just that it includes a lot of crime.

It tells the story of a two female con artists.  But don’t think these are fun, glamorous cons.  It’s a sad little scheme aimed to bilking old ladies out of whatever cash they have after pension day and any few bits of their mother’s good jewellery they might have been able to hang on to. 

It’s an interesting one, because I found it comic and miniature while reading it, but it has grown in my mind since, getting bigger and sadder over time.

LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro

I had always felt mildly guilty about never reading Munro, being a Nobel laureate and all, but she is a short story writer and that is just not my medium. She died recently and I finally decided to give her a go, choosing this book which is apparently her ‘only novel.’ In fact it is loosely connected short stories. Whatever. Really she is a wonderful writer.

Try this, from page 1, about a frog hunt:

“Old frogs knew enough to stay out of our way, but we did not want them; it was the slim young green ones, the juicy adolescents, that we were after, cool and slimy; we squished them tenderly in our hands, then plopped them in a honey pail and put the lid on.”

Or her description of soldier’s khaki uniforms “which had an aura of anonymous brutality, like the smell of burning,” or this, a description of her mother:

“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at time appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.”

A wonderful, depressingly and forbiddingly wonderful, writer.

ENEMY WOMEN by Paulette Jiles

I’m really at a loss on what to read next so I am going back through the New York Times Notable Books of the last twenty years. Right now I’m in 2003, which brings me this story of the American civil war, ENEMY WOMEN.

I feel like I know a lot about the combatant experience of the civil war (in this blog alone in the last couple of years THE MARCH by EL Doctorow, and MARCH by Geraldine Brooks). This though tells the civilian story, and in particular a female civilian. It is pretty hair-raising stuff, as the protagonist Adair struggles to walk across Missouri accompanied only by her incurable TB.

Bit of a side bar, but I had often heard of the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that used to exist in America, and this book contains a lovely imagining of them, perhaps the first I have ever read (If you have never heard of this, get googling, it is really bad. Flocks were so large it would take them three DAYS to fly past a single spot, with as many as 300 MILLION each hour. It is mind-blowing we managed to exterminate them in under 50 years). Anyway, here it is:

All around her their droppings cracked on the leaves on the ground, and once she heard a limb breaking from the weight of a hundred doves who had fluttered down to crowd onto it. It was a storm of doves, the sunlight became dim was it would dim in an eclipse and she rode hard to get away from them. She rode ten miles at a trot before they were clear of them. She and the horses both walked into a wide pool of water in a stream and washed themselves clean.