Author: sarahwp

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller

This is a book about loneliness.  It titillates us with the idea that it is about an extraordinary scandal, but really it is about ordinary loneliness.    

The narrator is one Barbara, an unmarried woman who has been teaching for decades.  She recounts the story of her friend and colleague, 41 year old Sheba, who gets into a relationship with a 15 year student.  This story is ‘not about me,’ Barbara says, but of course it is.  Every story is about its teller.

It opens in the aftermath of the relationship becoming public in the papers.  I found this an interesting description of the press:

. ..  I could never have predicted the hysterical prurience of the response.  The titillated fury.  These reporters write about Sheba as if they were seven-year-olds confronting the fact of their parents’ sexuality for the first time. 

This made me laugh.  I have always thought it incredibly creepy how interested British people are in talking about child abuse, all the while acting like they are so shocked about it.  But anyway this is not the main point of the story.  The narrator is.  She is hilarious and insightful.  Here she is on Sheba’s breasts:

She had a dancer’s bosom.  Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs.  Bill’s eyes widened.  Antonia’s narrowed.

And on an awkward colleague

Even his most minor conversational sallies have an agonized, over-meditated quality . . . .  Talking to him is rather like attempting to converse with a school play. 

She is also so lonely it has poisoned her.  Let me just quote at self-indulgent length:

‘Purpose – that’s closer to it,’ Sheba said.  ‘Children do give you a purpose.  In the sense of keeping you busy, in the sense of something to get out of bed and do every morning.  But that’s not the same as meaning.’

I laughed rather bitterly, I’m afraid.  What I thought was: That is the sort of fine distinction that a married woman with children can afford to make.

But she was right.  Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world . . . You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.  You make out To Do lists – reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets.  You dole out little treats to yourself – slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall.  And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more.  I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

She becomes obsessed with Sheba, and is the architect of her downfall, ensuring that she is eventually totally dependent on her.  Here she is talking about others:

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness – seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives.  They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized . . .

She is of course also talking about herself. I am not sure what I found so compelling about book.  I think it is because of the lockdown.  I am feeling much closer to craziness myself.

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

I thought this would be pandemic appropriate reading.  Apparently this thought of mine has already been predicted at scale, because someone has emergency published a edition and put it on Amazon.  Truly, if people are looking to seventeenth century literature for their margin, then nothing is safe.  I’m going to go ahead and call it: this truly is late capitalism.  I don’t know what comes after this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be good.

Perhaps this is dramatic.  The past is not usually so very different from the future.   I learn from this book is that the last pandemic to hit London (the bubonic plague in 1664) is not so very different from this one.  Try this: 

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.

I see then as now they were shocked by how quickly things went viral.

The story is about a man who, unlike most wealthy people, decides to try and ride out the plague in town, rather than rushing to the country.  While Defoe did not actually live through the plague, his uncle did, and most people believe this is pretty fair evocation of what it was like.  Just like today, it was hardest for the poorest: 

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services . . .

The rich meanwhile fled easily, carrying the plague with them all over the country.  Those left behind as today found ways to work through it.  Shops made you put your money in a bowl of vinegar before your touched it. 

Other things were not like today.    While this vinegar thing does not sound like a bad idea, they had some much worse ones.  Lots of people thought writing ABRACADBRA on a piece of paper and tying it around your neck would do the trick.  Perhaps I just need to clarify, for those people who believe that e.g., 5G causes corona, but that is does not in fact work.  Indeed they had ‘dead carts’ circling around eery night, and they would holler, “Bring out your dead,” so they could take them to the pits.  Let’s end on this long piece about the pits. 

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this. For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.

Okay, these pandemics are not that similar.  I am so grateful for modern science.  These anti-vaxxers, 5G-ers, climat change deniers: to the pits with them. 

MAGICAL THINKING by Augusten Burroughs

Finally someone with some success in the field of the personal essay!  I enjoyed this one.  Burroughs is a prolific memoirist.  Wikipedia tells me that:

Burroughs’ writing focuses on subjects such as advertising, psychiatrists, religious families, and home shopping networks

This is totally humourless but also pretty accurate. He’s an alcoholic and an advertising executive who is struggling to date in New York.  He has some serious #firstworldproblems, as below, but so do we all

Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots.  I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled.  One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.

I particularly enjoyed his problematic love life

He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away. It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct.  I know this behaviour because it’s something I would do.  This is how compatible we are. 

And:

I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide. 

And:

He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me.  I tseems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen.

I do always wonder about this.  These writers who produce a lot of content about their own lives, how do they do it?  Physicists I guess think a lot about physics.  Memoirists think about memories.  I’m torn.  Are they having deeper lives because they are thinking about them more deeply?  Or is it just all rather creepy and they ought to get out more? 

HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

Here is another example of how hard it is to write the personal essay.  Truly, it is a formidable form. 

I did enjoy this part, where he lays into the musical Rent for avoiding the inalienable fact that one of the hardest parts of being an artist is in fact paying rent.  He doesn’t like any suggestion that art is glamorous:

. . . the only thing that makes you an artist is making art.  And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. 

. . . . . . most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop clothes, easels, turpentine, ratafia-wrapped Chianti bottles  . . . forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.

These essays may not be so wonderful, but he at least suffered over them.  Also this I  found this interesting.  Not many people will admit that children can be unattractive, and certainly not themselves as children:

Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my over-arching trepidation with a  loud-mouthed bravura.  I was highly unpleasant.  I am not fishing here.  It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit. 

I did have to give up after a while though.  Try this sentence:

The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic furturistic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the  mid-cetnry grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing. 

Indeed, art is hard.

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

Here is a novel that assumes you have a much more detailed knowledge of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks than in fact you do.

It begins in a Kossack village, and you learn all about the rural life and the casual rape of the early twentieth century.  There is, as befits any self-respecting nineteenth century Russia novel, a big cast of characters, all of whom have multiple names.  There is lots of bracingly Russian stuff. Here’s an old man:

It’s time – I’ve lived my days, I’ve served my Tsars, and drunk vodka enough in my day

Here’ a wife finding her husband drunk:

Daria thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his tongue, and helped him to ease himself

I mean I’ve heard of doing anything for love, but this is ridiculous.  All of this is all just very much prep for what the author wants you to know about, which is the First World War, the Revolution, and the ensuing Civil War.  The author was in involved in the two latter (from age of 13) and it shows.  Try this:

All the objects around were distinct and exageratedly real, as they appear after a night’s unbroken watching

I love the suggestion that we all know what it is like after a night on sentry duty.  He also appears to think we are all equally informed about Russian politics.  The end of the book becomes a haze of revolutions and counter-revolutions.  What was most interesting was to see how the idea that your class was more important than your country took over on the Russian side, and how many people escaped with their lives because of it.

The front broke to pieces. In October the soldiers had deserted in scattered, unorganized groups; but by the beginning of December entire companies, regiments, divisions were retiring from their positions in good order, sometimes marching with only light equipment, but more frequently taking regimental property with them, breaking into warehouses, shooting their officers, pillaging en route, and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide backto their homes.   

You so want it to end well for them. I guess we know it did not. But at least a good chunk of these young men got the chance to live long enough to see it all go wrong

DEPENDENCY by Tove Ditlevesen

I wondered when I read the first book in this autobiographical trilogy why the author was so cheerful about her childhood, which overall looked pretty ropey what with the diphtheria and the rickets and everything.  Having read this third book, about her adulthood, I now understand. Her childhood does look pretty cushy in comparison.

She first marries an old guy largely because he published her first poetry and she wants to be financially looked after by him.  To modern eyes, it’s kind of amazing how straightforward she is about this; but  what I got from reading it is that in the 1940s you were more or less expected to be in a transactional relationship, where you provide domestic work and sex and he provides money.  I know I say this on this blog about once a month but THANK GOD IF I HAD TO BE BORN FEMALE IT HAPPENED NOW AND NOT EARLIER.

Anyway, this guy does not get what he bargained for, because what Ditlevsen is interested in is not domestic work but writing.  This is what she spends her days on

I’m just writing; maybe it will be good; maybe not.  The most important thing is that I feel happy when I’m writing, just as I always have.  I feel happy and forget everything around me. .

Even this is not enough though.  Here she is standing at the window watching young lovers:

I am only twenty years old and the days descend on me un-noticeably like dust, each one just like the rest

She leaves the old guy for WHOLE NEXT PARA IS FULL OF SPOILERS BECAUSE A LOT GOES ON a younger guy, and they have a baby.  She then has a hair-raising illegal abortion, and then gets pregnant again from a one-night stand with this one doctor. She insists he gives her an abortion, and this is where her problems begin, because he uses Demerol during the procedure, and she is immediately addicted.  She leaves her husband to marry this doctor, even though she does not like him and indeed thinks he has mental health issues, so that she can continue to get Demerol. He also gives her methadone, choral, etc.  He also isolates her so no one knows what is going on.  She is close to death when she saves herself by using a moment of lucidity to phone a friend.  She ends up in rehab and her husband in an asylum. 

She recovers and tried to get back with her second husband.  He rejects her.   

I cried when I read his letter.  No man had ever turned me down before.

Like, FYI, Tove, don’t tell people things like that.  No one wants to hear how popular you are.

She fall in love (at first sight!) with a guy who becomes her fourth husband, and he moves her to the countryside, so that it is harder for her to acquire drugs.  

What’s curious about this novel is that despite so much going on – four husbands, two abortions, three children (one adopted, I didn’t even tell you about that), many best-selling books – the appeal of this novel is not at all in its story.  In fact I never read such really salacious material presented so un-salacioiusly.  You feel weirdly connected to the real life of someone in Copehagen decades ago.  Here she is making dinner, about to leave some husband: 

While I’m standing in the kitchen turning on the potatoes, my heart starts hammering and the white tile wall behind the stovetop flickers before my eyes, as if the tiles were starting to fall off.

The strange fascination of this book is its total lack of sentimentality or excuses.  I don’t think I would be capable of giving an account of my life so utterly without justifications or apologies.  It’s really remarkable for its honesty and makes you feel like you maybe know her better than most people you actually do know. 

At the end she seems in a better place, being away from the chemists and their jars of methadone, but I am sorry to say that I checked date of publication and date of death ,and the poor lady only had five years left.  She killed herself in 1976, so while I have not checked Wikipedia I can suppose that indeed the addiction did not let go.  I feel sad about it, as if she just died today, rather than decades before I was born.

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE by Sloane Crosley

This collection of comic essays show you how hard it is to write comic essays.  It was an easy read, but let’s just say David Sedaris’ crown is secure. 

It’s my second book in under a week by a young woman living in New York, after MY MISSPENT YOUTH , so perhaps it is just I am a bit tired of the pitfalls of trying to make it in publishing.

It’s kind of dated, having been written ten years ago.  You can tell because she explains vegetarianism like we are going to find it really freaky.  Also the reviews!  I see that some male reviewer at the Guardian comments that he has a ‘tendency to be disappointed by the most well-rewarded female columnists. . . ” As if female columnists are both exceedingly rare and all very similar. 

Some of it however was pretty funny.  Let’s end with her father’s obsession with fire:

For major holiday dinners, there is no such thing as a ‘fire in the background.’  The flaming abcess in the living room is always in the foreground, dominating the attention and the conversation.“It’s a good fire, Denis,” says my mother, standing yards away from it.
My father contemplates this, having conducted a staring match with the fire for almost an hour.  It’s hard to say who’s winning.

To be honest I’ve already largely forgotten this book.  So: nothing further.  

TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME by James Meek

I started reading this book in the glorious pre-pandemic days of one week ago when COVID was some Chinese problem.  It begins as a medieval quest, with an ill-assorted group of characters heading off to France.How jolly!  There’s a pig herder and a kinky sex scene with King Edward’s mother.

You hear a couple of things about the ‘qualm’ in France, but it is mostly dismissed as an invention of priests looking to get rich.  Then villages start to be empty, pits start to be found, and the first of the merry band die, and you realize that in fact this novel is not a story of a fun roadtrip but in fact an evocation of what is was like to see the Black Death take down England.  In almost exactly parallel time in real life COVID came to Italy and the UK went into lockdown. 

 I considered stopping reading but decided to keep going to see what lessons could be learnt.  What I mostly learnt was THANK GOD FOR THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE. These poor people are just busy fooling around with bunches of flowers and amulets.  

In a ballsy move this author decided to write his medieavel novel in medieval language.  Incredibly, it works.  And more than works, it is almost half the appeal.  The characters are from varied backgrounds and all speak different kinds of language.  Here’s a wealthy lady about her servant:  

“It’s Cotswold,” she tells Pogge. “It’s Outen Green. As if no French never touched their tongues. I ne know myself sometimes what they mean. They say steven in place of voice, and shrift and housel for confession and absolution, and bead for prayer.”

These little snippets give a sense

 Ness’s deaf eldmother, Gert, who when she was young had seen the king ride by at a hunt like a giant, on a white horse, with gold stars on the harness, sat and span by the backdoor.

 And

 He told me truelove things, and made me laugh, and I would kiss him; but to kiss him were wrong.  And it was like to when I was a little girl.  Mum made an apricot pie, and left me with it, and forbade me eat even one deal of it. But I ate one deal, because it needed me a sweet thing, and after I’d eaten one deal, I was already damned, and might as well eat the whole pie. 

The characters are very varied. One is a priest, who is busy shrifting and houseling like there is no tomorrow as people die.  They don’t know too much about hygiene but they are very big on confession.

 I said that in the circumstances I would confine myself to mortal sins.  He need only confess to sacrilege, homicide, adultery, fornication, false testimony, rapine, theft, pride, envy and avarice.                  

There was silence.  Hornstrake inquired if I had finished, as he had expected there to be at least one sin he had not committed.

I gestured to the furnace. . . I did not opt, I said, to compel a confession by reminding him of the alternative, but eternity was of a very long duration. 

People often praise historical novels for being topical.  I can’t fault this one for that: it was super topical.  Topic being, pandemic.  However I think it was the non-pandemic, apricot pie parts I liked the best

 

HOW COULD SHE by Lauren Mechling

 This is a depressing novel about the implosion of the publishing industry.  It’s like reading a book written about the social life of weavers just as the loom has been invented.

It’s not marketed as such.  In fact it is marketed as jolly chick lit, which it sort of tries to be, but chick lit in the context of the collapse of the chicks’ careers.  The author is a magazine writer, so I guess she is writing what she knows.

It’s about the friendship of three women after that friendship has died.  One of them moves to New York to try and find a job in publishing after a brutal breakup, and the other two variously pity and avoid her.  Here she is, at her first cocktail party.

“Hey,” she said, a desperate edge to her voice. “Are you going to the drinks thing?”“Where is it?”Something lifted within her. “I don’t know—I can ask Sunny?” “Nah.” Gus shook his head and looked down. “I’m supposed to meet someone in the city, actually.” He didn’t need to say any more. Another woman was written all over his face. Geraldine’s heart snapped. ….. She was humiliated, but also slightly relieved that he was leaving so she wouldn’t have to spend the drinks portion of the evening being rejected.

Ouch.  But where the book really shines is in the workplace:

All the staffers had gone to Ivy League schools and had the social skills of staplers.  They stared at her from their workstations and waited for her to talk, and she had to fill the air with references to her quirky travels and friends and obsessions.  There was something profoundly sad about these once-brilliant people who clung to their perches in corporate media as if there were a chance in hell the industry would take care of them.  Get out while you still can, Sunny wanted to tell them all, but she had to pretend to be operating under the same misapprehension as the rest of them.

Overall it didn’t quite work out for me as a book – I couldn’t get up a head of steam to care about the characters, and their relationship.  But I enjoyed the world.  Makes me feel like while I may not have made the perfect career choices, it could have been worse.

MY MISSEPENT YOUTH by Meghan Daum

Apparently 2001 was really a long time ago.  Enjoy this extract from one of the essays in this book:

I am not what most people would call a “computer person.”  I have utterly no interest in chat rooms, news groups, or most Web sites.

Imagine a world where you get to not be a “computer person.”  Imagine a world where there is a concept called “computer person.”  Today that is just a person.  

 These essays are about Daum’s experience of being in her late twenties and her life not having worked out as she planned.  (Whose life has worked out as planned?  Only the most extreme sociopaths, and maybe Taylor Swift, I would say). 

The extract is from the first essay, which is about the time she had an online romance, and is probably the best in the book.  This is not so much for thoughts on these “Web sites,” about which she indeed has not much idea, but about what it is that makes romance so painful:

Of all the troubling details of this story, the one that bothers me most is the way I slurped up his attention like some kind of dying animal.  My addiction to PFSlider’s messages indicated a monstrous narcissism.  But it also revealed a subtler desire that I didn’t fully understand at the time. My need to experience an old-fashioned kind of courtship was stronger than I had ever imagined.  For the first time in my life, I was not involved in a protracted ‘hang-out’ that would lead to a quasi-romance. 

The other good essay was about her $70,000 debt.  This is largely from her choice to get a graduate education in that most remunerative of fields, creative writing

And even though I was having a great time and becoming a better writer, the truth was that the year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions. 

She blames this on knowing too many rich people.  I can vouch that this is a problem.

. . . my years at Vassar did more than expand my intellect.  They expanded my sense of entitlement so much that, by the end, I had no ability to separate myself from the many extremely wealthy people I encountered there.  . . . Self-entitlement is a quality that has gotten a  bad name for itself and yet, in my opinion, it’s one of the best things a student can get out of an education.  Much of my success and happiness is a direct result of it.  But self-entitlement has also contributed to my downfall, mostly because of my inability to recognize where ambition and chutzpah end and cold, hard cash begins. 

The rest of the essays I didn’t find particularly interesting or insightful, but I admire the ambition.  Thinking that in just writing about you own ordinary life you can come up with interesting insights is a bold move. That it paid off twice in ten essays is not terrible odds.