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THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

I needed some cheering up so decided to whip through a Heyer. My blog tells me I have read fifteen of her books in the last ten years, and this one was as comforting as any of them.

AJAX tells the story of a bankrupt aristocratic family who, due to a boating accident, are suddenly faced with an unknown cousin as their heir. Their scheme is to marry off the oldest daughter to this man. She violently objects. Being a Heyer, you know this is 100% what is going to happen.

It does indeed happen. But unusually for Heyer it does via lots of social issues, including customs duties, Napoleonic wars, champagne used for boot blacking, and the invention of the spinning jenny. But however she gets there, it happens cheerfully and all ends well. If only real life could step up to the Heyer bar. We seem to have all the social issues with none of the happy endings.

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues. This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big. At least the father is looking to strike it big. The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu. (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID. They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on real life. I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character. This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth. He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior. His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree).

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family. Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them. This casts the book in a different light for me. I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out. I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left.

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not coincidentally not a great time in my personal life, when I read a lot of David Sedaris. And by a lot, I mean it all, and mostly in the early hours of the morning.

Recently I googled for authors ‘like Sedaris,’ and was surprised by how few options there were.. I gave the options a go (Crossley, Burroughs, Rakhoff) and can report that the options are even fewer than Google suggested, in fact essentially nil. No one is writing the comic personal essay like Sedaris. And by no one, I mean no one. Really, I find this remarkable. Everyone has a personal life. Most people have a sense of humour. It’s incredible that Sedaris has, at least in my opnion, not one truly viable competitor.

I started a re-read of him, to try and figure out what he is doing. My blog tells me this is the third time for FLAMES. And three times round, I still can’t tell exactly what it is he is doing so well. Here he is on glasses:

Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish. Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

And on smoking:

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill, and then empty.

I tried to map out a couple of the essays, and my theory is the success is the apparent ease: conversational and yet so artful. In later years he has got a bit sappy, one has to hear about his feelings, and in particular his feelings about his father, but at his best: he’s quite alone in his medium.

EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan

This writer wishes she was Sally Rooney. So do I.

Their settings are similar, being mostly about an Irish millennial’s love life, but for me it lacks Rooney’s clarity and intelligence. It also has some extremely contradictory axes to grind about left-wing politics.

Ava is teaching English in Hong Kong. She moves in with a banker she is sleeping with, Julian, largely because she does not want to pay her own rent. This makes her sound venal, and she is. Meanwhile, she enjoys lecturing everyone about left-wing politics. On the other hand, no one can say she is cheating Julian, because he emphasizes repeatedly that they are not in a relationship. This upsets her, but as she says:

I couldn’t even feel truly, sumptuously sorry for myself, because it wasn’t reciprocation I was craving. My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathise with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

So the book wasn’t all bad. It had some sharp and accurate observations such as the above. But it really fell apart when it came to social commentary. Here she is meeting Julian

People who had gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question. Then, like ‘everyone,’ he (said he’d) gone to the City. “Which city?” I said. Julian assessed whether women made jokes, decided we did, and laughed.

I mean this is just nonsense. Generally people who have gone to e.g. Harvard will go out of their way to stay they studied in Boston and similar. And in general young men will laugh at your jokes. It’s older men who struggle with that. So to me it was all came across as rather pat, academic social commentary about income inequality, by someone who has so far had rather a good time. Take the fact that she refers to her teaching English as the whole “neo-colonial TEFL thing.” This just drips privilege, as if it would be better for kids not to be able to speak the international language of business because it would make history neater. Or try this, justification of her living with Julian:

Who would believe me if I said it made no difference whether I lived in his apartment or a dingy Airbnb? Yes, I’d say, I am perfectly apathetic as to whether I spend most of my income renting a tiny room with people who hate me. These things are quite subjective. I could have soft towels and five-star dinners, or I could check my windowsill every morning to see how many cockroaches died there in the night.

What a heart-breaking analysis of the challenges of inequality. An expensive Airbnb: I mean.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages. Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be.

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.” She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.
. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”
“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing. “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues. The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset. The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy. Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world. They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same.

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor. Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this. Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . . And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel. Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCollough was working as a medical researcher when she found out she was making less than male colleagues. Determined to make more, she turned to art. Incredibly, this gambit worked. This epic of an Australian family was a bestseller and spawned a very popular mini-series. (“Instant vomit,” according to McCollough).

While I can see many issues with this book, including extreme cheese and really stilted dialogue, I have to go ahead and confess: I enjoyed it. Partly, I enjoyed the plot, with this much older priest falling in love with this young girl. But mostly I enjoyed the setting. For example, did you know that if you can shear sheep fast, (three hundred a day) you are a ‘dreadnought’ and can make as much money from betting how fast you can go as from actually shearing. Also did you know that in shearing sheds:

At each’s man’s stand . . . was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching seat into the wood of the board

Despite this being in many ways an old-fashioned book, McCullough certainly is unafraid to advance a specifically female view of the world. She has a lot to say about domestic drudgery, and about how no one actually loves any of their kids after the fifth, and about how the men in rural Australia think they are good kissers only because the women are good liars.

That instant vomit thing tips you off. This lady was a character. She was convinced all critics knew ‘in their hearts’ she was just smarter and better than them. She wrote 30,000 words a day, and virtually ‘never made mistakes’ because she had perfect spelling and great grammar. And she died a millionaire many times over, so take that, other medical researchers

Let me note that I read this in my absolute favourite format, which is a very elderly second hand paperback, with browned pages, and as an amazing bonus it even had a weird newspaper clipping as a bookmark. Enjoy the mysterious caption especially: “I used to be a teenage doctor until I discovered eminence.”

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

It’s rare I loathe a book, but here we are. It has many good reviews, and was longlisted for the Booker, so I am the minority in this view. But really. First of all, it’s all very lyrical. This is always annoying. Try how this potentially good piece of dialogue is ruined

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling

Second of all, it’s all about tough men, and it pretends like it is supposed to show how terrible the consequences of violence are. Meanwhile clearly this book is all about the romance of violence. I don’t need to google the author to find out the author is a man. It’s almost always men who like to spend their novels thinking about violence, and I don’t think we need to think that hard to find out why that might not be so interesting for women. I just don’t need to live in their fantasy

CARRIE by Steven King

I picked up CARRIE because I read Steven King’s autobiography, and was curious to see what the book that changed his life was like.

It was his first novel,and he almost fainted when the publisher offered him $400K for it, because he was barely paying his bills at the time. He’d actually thrown the first draft in the bin, and it only made it to the publisher at all because his wife fished it out and insisted he go on with it. To read his autobiography, you’d think by this stage he was on the verge of past it, about to sink into a life of low income jobs, nearly missing his potential. In reading the back cover I discover he was actually only TWENTY-SIX. For god’s sake, Steven, I don’t think it’s even possible to waste your life already when you’re just in your twenties. It’s only in your forties you start looking down that particular barrel. Unless of course you commit a murder and get caught. I was listening to a podcast recently about a man who killed someone at 15, and is getting out now, 40 years later. First thing he is going to do is have an omelette, he said. Second thing is go to his parents graves to apologize for throwing his life away.

It’s possible this post is going off course. Back to CARRIE. What I found surprising was how straightforward it was, how little plot it had, and how little real ‘horror’ was involved. It’s essentially a “worm turns” story, though in this case the worm devours its hometown after turning. For those who don’t know SPOILER ALERT the book is about a girl who is badly bullied at school and ends up blowing up her prom with her telekentic powers.

Apparently when this was written, horror was very much about shadowy alleys and old parchments, so it was revolutionary in its ordinary setting and conventional protagonists. It no longer feels revolutionary, but is still a solid, engaging read, and captures very well what it was to be a teenage girl (not that surprising because Steven King you were SO YOUNG WHEN YOU WROTE IT I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU FELT YOU WERE WASTING YOUR LIFE.)

A GIRL’S STORY by Annie Ernaux

Here is a memoir about a summer of sex and fun. It drips with shame. I’m not sure why. I guess in 1958, things were different for girls. She’s French, she’s seventeen, a counsellor at a summer camp, and gets into it with a bunch of the boys. If someone got that much action today it’d be all over her Instagram. But that’s not how she takes it:

I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.

There is one boy she is particularly in to, and when she finally gets with him (after a fondue party (!)):

There is no sense of degradation, no room for anything but raw desire, chemically pure, as frenzied as the drive to rape, this desire for H to possess her, take her virginity.

It’s like: sweetheart. Why you on about degradation? It’s fine. You are allowed to want to have sex. The whole thing is however swift and painful. I’m too big, he helpfully tells her. Also, he comforts her with the information that “often women do not climax until after giving birth”

She is so bothered by what she did over this summer, and the ensuing rejection by this prince of a guy, that she develops bulimia and stops menstruating. Then, she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s THE SECOND SEX. Her life is transformed. She is:

. . .awakened to a world stripped of the appearances it had worn only days before – a world in which everything from the cars on the Boulevard Yser to the necktied students she meets . . signifies the power of men and the alienation of women

It’s hard to imagine what it would be like having to survive your adolescence without even the basic vocabulary of feminism. I found it very touching, because I read earlier de Beauvoir’s MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, where you learn how very hard she fought herself to own her ideas, and it is interesting to see what a gift they were to others. Still, says Ernaux, understanding your shame does not make it go away. She is thus impelled to write this account of that eventful summer. She writes to understand it:

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing

This is I think an interesting observation, but overall there was a good deal too much of this. Ernaux is now an older lady, and spends too much of this memoir reflecting on what writing means in general, and describing in detail how she looked these boys up on this ‘Internet’ she insists on capitalizing. Like no one ever stalked an ex- before.

However it was interesting to see how she came to feel so ashamed, and how she hauled herself at least half way out of it.

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

Here is a book about what happens when there are not enough social workers. Augusten Burroughs parents are getting a divorce:

My father grew hostile and remote . . . And my mother began to go crazy. Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen red! sort of way. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.

She eventually give over her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, who believes children over the age of thirteen should be completely free. He also believes that he direction of his poop in the toilet bowl contains messages from god, as does choosing Bible verses at random. His oldest daughter preserves his poops on an outdoor table, and checks the Bible for him for all sorts of questions. The other children, some biological, some not, are left quite free, to knock sunroofs into the ceiling (by just making a hole), to eat dog food, and to get raped by adults. Apparently when children are completely unsupervised it does not take long for predatory types to recognize this as an opportunity.

At 14 he has a relationship with a 33 year old man that he believes is loving. So too does the 33 year old, who makes such red-flag covered statements as the below:

I mean my feelings for your are so huge, I don’t think I can contain them. Sometimes I want to hold you so tight it scares me. Like I want to hold you until the life is gone, so you can’t ever vanish.

The book is comic, and he is close to some of his step-siblings, so it is not as bleak as the statutory rape would have you believe. But I see from Google that the Finch family sued, arguing that much of what was in the book was fiction, and now the book is marketed as a ‘novel’ rather than a ‘memoir’. They are apparently amazed that someone they looked after at such a time should tell such lies about them. So I guess it is sad either way: either it’s a sad childhood, or a sad set of lies about a childhood. Anyway, I enjoyed it.