Author: sarahwp

HONS AND REBELS by Jessica Mitford

It is a well known that home-schooling rarely ends well, and here is a prime example.  . 

She is brought up with her five siblings in a stately home in the English countryside by her deeply eccentric parents, describing her childhood as having a ‘rich vein of lunacy.’  Interestingly, one of those siblings was Nancy Mitford, whose comic novel THE PURSUIT OF LOVE I have read four or five times.  It is so hilariously strange that I used to think it was semi-autobiographical, now I conclude it is just straight up autobiographical, perhaps even toned down a bit. 

It’s not so much they don’t’ send them to school as they don’t’ do anything at all for them. The kids, already pretty weird, are left to their own devices, and just get weirder and weirder.

Jessica saves all her birthday and Christmas money every year into her ‘running away fund’.  No one takes her seriously but at eighteen she runs off to join the Spanish civil war.  She doesn’t get there, but she does end up marrying some guy she has known for three weeks. Incredibly, it is a happy marriage but not without some challenges:.   

No one had ever explained to me that you had to pay for electricity; and lights, electric heaters, stoves blazed away night and day. 

They end up in a lot of debt.  They move to America and are overwhelmed by the hospitality, comparing it to the upper class England they know:  “It’s inconceivable that anyone would ask them to stay unless they’d known them for ages, and probably not even then if they didn’t know their parents.”

And how involved everyone is:

Roaming the streets of New York, we encountered many examples of this delightful quality of New Yorkers, forever on their toes, violently, restlessly involving themselves in the slightest situation brought to their attention, always posting alternatives, already ready with an answer or an argument

The book ends abruptly with her husband off to fight in WWII.  She tells us, in one of the only footnotes in the book, that “He was killed in action in November 1941, at the age of twenty-three,” making this by far the strangest sublimation of grief I’ve ever seen in a memoir.

This is not her only tragedy. While she ran off to join the Communists, her sister Unity ran off to join the Nazis, falling madly in love with Hitler, and then, when the war began trying to kill herself and ending a vegetable. 

I am going to read the next instalment.  I really can’t imagine where this life is going.

SATISFACTION by Gillian Greenwood

It could be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I am here to tell you that you can judge a book by it’s author bio. The first line tells you not just that the author attended Oxford but exactly what college. RED FLAG.

The characters lead lives that are achingly upper middle class you could just vom. One character is impressed that someone wears white shoes with a summer dress without looking common. Apparently this is not supposed to be a judgement on this character, but just the sort of thing people do think about.

I picked this book out of the bookcase of an AirBnB and with such books I do usually like to roll the dice. Here I went with what looked like raging chick lit expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Instead I was unpleasantly surprised. It was both boring and unbelievable, which is something of a feat. Anyway the cold beer helped it go down

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone’s life.

I wanted to put that down in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder.

An amazing beginning. I loved Greer’s Pulitzer winning novel LESS, so had great hopes for this book, which is the story of a man who ages backwards.  Set in the early twentieth century, some of it was charming. Lightbulbs are described as “. . . resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard.” Or here is Max’s mother:

She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty.  The women who sat this way are all dead now. 

Leaving aside how poignant this is, how do you even do the research to know this is a thing of that period?  This sounds like a rave review, but in fact, surprising myself, far from actually really liking this novel, I could not even get up the enthusiasm to finish it. 

The key story is supposed to be his love for some girl.  He barely knows her, and lots of the novel descends into overwrought imaginings of her as the ideal woman.  Somehow this just struck me as very boring.  I’ve don’t know if it was because I had just finished THE HUMAN STAIN, but I just felt like I didn’t need any more of mens’ internal struggle with the idea of women who never actually appear. 

I don’t know if I’m overly woke, or what.  I don’t thinks so though.  I think I’m just very much feeling life’s brevity at the moment, so I’m all about quitting what I’m not enjoying.  So quit it I did, without worrying too much about my reasons.  That I’m not having fun is enough.  I strongly suspect that that, my friends, might be the beginning of adulthood.    It’s been a long time coming.

 

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M Broom

I wanted to like this novel.  It was rapturously received, and has an interesting concept.  It tells the story of the family home of the author, and so is a story of New Orelans, of African American life, or hurricanes, and etc. 

However I found it sort of dull and uninsightful.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read so many thousands of words of memoir and come away with so little understanding of someone.  Let me give you this taste, here, speaking of her parents:

As Simon and Ivory settled into life in the rebuilt house, time moved in the usual distinct increments (morning, afternoon, evening; weekends and weekdays), but after a while, everything new turned old and they stopped seeing time as composed of moments.  The years blurred.

I mean, really?   This seems a bizarre imaginative leap into the inner life of your parents.  One point of interest was that the author has two names, Sarah and Monique.    She says:

In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did

This I found to be true.  As a fellow Sarah, I can say that the name is wonderfully anonymous.  It gives away absolutely the most bare minimum about you, and makes you fantastically difficult to Google. 

CHERRY by Nico Walker

Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy. 

This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel.  It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks.  It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks.  It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.

Let’s enjoy first his descriptions.  A frat house basement:

 done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder

His fellow recruits in the army:

. .  there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room.  Fat kids. Acne.  Acne on the face.  Acne on the body.  Skinny kids.  I was a skinny kid.  I wasn’t strong.  We looked like shit.  We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television  . .

He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough.  He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags.  It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home.  In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin.  He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:

One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. 

And

I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation.  Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit.  With robbery it’s a matter of abasement.  Are you abased?  Careful then.  You might rob something. 

Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught.  He waits for them:

There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go!  The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared.   He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful

INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakaur

This is the true story of a young man who died trying to live out his dreams.  The dreams were kind of stupid, but it’s still kind of sad. 

Chris McCandless acts normal around his parents at his university graduation.  They don’t hear from him again till he is dead of starvation two years later.  He has plotted this from the start. Here is a letter to his sister:

. . .  once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live.  I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever. 

His parents haven’t abused him or anything.  They are very normal but he is kind of a little bitch.  The author includes a great quote from GK Chesterton:

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy

Chris wants to be in touch with nature using his own two hands and such implements as he finds romantic (e.g., rifles).  He wonders the country for a while until he decides to backpack into Alaska where due to some blunders (e.g., deciding maps are not romantic) he starves to death. 

Krakeur puts Chris into context with the various other dreamers, such as a climber named Waterman, who spent 145 days alone climbing some mountain and then lost his mind attempting to climb the next mountain with just a tub of margarine as supplies.  Krakeur outlines the type, young men with a monomaniacal bent, of which he says he was one, nearly dying himself in Alaska as a “self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life”  As he says:

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it . .

I don’t know who this ‘you’ is he is addressing but I don’t think they’re probably female.  It is quite sweet though that he thinks this is a universal experience. 

In any case, I have made a little bit of fun of McCandless, which is not perhaps very kind.  I admire his idealism, and his attempt to do something unusual with his life.  It is just very tough to swallow how illogical and contradictory it all is.  The love of Tolstoy, for example, who everyone knows talked a big talk about altruism while frogmarching his unwilling wife through 13 children and into poverty.  This idea that ‘man vs nature’ could involve a gun but not a map.  The idea that living without government is a great idea, as if millions of Somalians aren’t fully available to tell you that it’s not.  It’s all so silly, I struggle to be sympathetic. 

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

I couldn’t finish this book because there was so much whining.  It tells the story of an older college professor who slowly pushes himself out of his job, because he can’t stand the clamour around an allegedly racist statement he made.  He then has a fling with this female janitor which involves a lot of concerns about his erections.  It’s just like, snore. 

It’s not like I don’t think he has problems, what with needing to time the Viagra and his younger colleagues leveraging the scandal to secure their own promotions, but what I found annoying was the novel’s inflated sense of how unjust this was.  And not even that it was unjust, but that it ought not be unjust. It’s as if they are amazed to learn that life is not fair, and have no equipment for dealing with it  I guess that’s what’s called male privilege.

I so loved PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, but looking back on this blog I see I also hated the first book in this trilogy, AMERICAN PASTORAL.  I think I better give up on Roth.  Though let me end on a sweeter note, as I did like this description of someone giving up dating:

. .. I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience — or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism — to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.

Erotic professionalism. I love that.

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small” (Rebecca Hazelton SLASH FICTION)

This is a well-written novel with two parallel stories. One covers the AIDS crisis among gay men in the 1980s and the other is set thirty years later, with some tangential characters from that first story now dealing with different issues. I enjoyed each of the stories in themselves, a lot, because Makkai is clearly a gifted writer, but I kept waiting for the two stories to join up, or resolve somehow, even if only thematically. They never did. It was bizarre. It was like two traditional novels smooshed together for no apparent reason.

Also, and this has nothing to do with this novel, but it’s remarkably sad how many novels there are about AIDS deaths in the eighties for Americans and how few about Africans

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

For some reason, I always thought this was an epic poem, and avoided it accordingly.  In fact, it is an account of the author’s childhood, which was packed with incident and heroism.  Incident and heroism is good for epic poems, but not what you typically want in a childhood.

She spent much of her early life in a small town in Arkansas, in the 1930s.  I do not need to say much more for you to get the general idea re: racism.  But still, the specifics are surprising.  Apparently, for example, the fact that her grandmother was sometimes referred to as ‘Mrs’ was regarded as a rare mark of great respect, accorded to her because she ran the general store. 

Later Angelou and her brother go to live with her mother, and there she is, as an eight year old, raped by her mother’s boyfriend (that usual suspect). It is a stomach-churningly terrible scene.  She is so hurt she has to go to hospital, but she won’t tell what happened because he threatens to kill her brother if she does.  Her brother reassures here that he can take ‘anyone,’ and so much does she admire him (despite the fact he is just eleven himself) that she believes him and so tells the name of her attacker.  He is sentenced to a whole year in jail. Not to worry, as her family has him murdered the day he gets out.

She moves in with her father for a while, but after being stabbed by her father’s girlfriend (after a very strange trip to Mexico) she runs away, and lives for a month with a group of homeless kids in a junk yard.

After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself.  The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity.  Odd that the homeless children. . . could initiate me into the brotherhood of man.  After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to see myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. 

This bizarre translation of her time at the dump into a lesson in brotherhood is emblematic of the book as a whole. The summary here might make it sound like her life, and thus the book, was bleak and tough, but that is not at all how her it feels: it is fun, and loving, and hopeful, like there’s always a way out.  

In her late teens she becomes worried she is a haemaphrodite (don’t ask).  She approaches a popular boy, and asks the immortal words: 

Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?   

Apparently he would like that, and poor Angelous gets pregnant that day.  This is where the book ends, but given what I know about her, I have no doubt that she will transform getting pregnant in high school into something wonderful.  This lady is a boss.  It’s a high bar, in life and in literature. 

Side point, interesting overview of how she wrote:

She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.

Wikipeda

Sherry! Like I said, she’s a boss. She was encouraged to write the book by James Baldwin (who reverse-psychologied her by saying no autobiography could be art) and the first person she showed a draft to was Jessica Mitford, sister of the famous Nazis. This is some six degrees of separation

DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith

Here is a comic novel that has not been out of print since 1892.  It’s hard to describe it’s appeal, beyond that it is fun to laugh at the bourgeoisie, especially I suspect if you are the bourgeoisie. 

Charles Pooter has an office job and lives in the London suburbs.  Don’t we all?  He has worked twenty years in the same job, married to the same wife, and loves a little DIY.  His diary is one of small victories and defeats: battles with the housekeeper; awkward dinners with ‘friends;’ his son’s interest in amateur dramatics.  Here he is on housekeeping:

“I told Sarah not to bring up the blanc-mange again for breakfast. It seems to have been placed on our table at every meal since Wednesday… In spite of my instructions, that blanc-mange was brought up again for supper. To make matters worse, there had been an attempt to disguise it, by placing it in a glass dish with jam round it…I told Carrie, when we were alone, if that blanc-mange were placed on the table again I should walk out of the house

He also thinks he is hilarious, which is itself hilarious:

Gowing began sniffing and said: “I’ll tell you what, I distinctly smell dry rot.” I replied: “You’re talking a lot of dry rot yourself.” I could not help roaring at this, and Carrie said her sides quite ached with laughter.  I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook

It’s remarkably mundane, but he thinks it worthy of a diary, and like Peyps, thinks it will be read when he is dead.  I found it very funny at the time, but as I write this blog I wonder if in fact I did not find it rather sad.  I guess everyone has to try their hardest to assign meaning to their little lives, and who can say what level of meaning is ‘enough.’  Cult leaders have probably taken it a little too far. Everyone else, have at it, I say.