Category: fiction

THE SECRET DAIRY OF ADRIAN MOLE AGED 13 AND 3/4 by Sue Townsend

I re-read this while slogging through COVID, and I am struck by what a good book it is. According to my blog, I haven’t read it since at least 2009 (when I started keeping track). I am amazed by how clearly I remember it: characters, incidents, even lines. Pandora Braithwaite is the ur-crush of Western Culture.

I was surprised to learn that Townsend was 35 when she wrote it, and it was her first published book. Her teenage son apparently once asked her why they didn’t go on safari ‘like everyone else; and the voice for the book popped into her head fully formed. She wrote the first third in a matter of weeks – and then put it away in a box. It only got finished because other people pushed for it (a similar story btw for Stephen King’s CARRIE) and it just shows you: we really have no idea about the quality of what we are doing. I find that both horrifying and liberating.

FIRST LOVE by Gwendoline Riley

This is a harrowing story of a marriage going bad. I clearly have little to no experience of really toxic relationships, because mostly I was just like: why don’t you leave? Clearly I lack experience, because I struggle to even imagine a world where I would put with how this lady gets spoken to.

Also super harrowing is her relationship with her mother, possibly worse because here there are not so many harsh words. Let me quote at length. Here she is on her mother:

Perhaps I should be moved by her more than I am. I love animals, their natural ways. I have asked her about my – our – childhood, that house, but you wouldn’t think I’d spoken. She just stared back at me. Maybe she never noticed what we grew up with. Left to herself, back there, as I’m sure she felt she was, she laced the fetid air with her high-pitched humming her little self-announcements:

‘Well, I’m going to sit in the sun lounge if anyone wants me. Do they? No.’

‘Well, I’m going to eat some strawberries and cream and watch Wimbledon, Yes.’

My brother was even more incensed by these notices than I.

‘Do I give a shit?’ he’d scream.

You couldn’t see the television if the curtains were open, so they never were open. She’d clear aspace on the settee and hold up by her chest a bowl of mushy frozen strawberries, topped with a spray cream. She lifted her chin, bared her teeth.

THE SHOOTING PARTY by Isabel Colegate

Historical fiction is kind of rare, and this is a wonderful example of it. It tells about a 1913 shooting party, and is really remarkable in just 181 pages in creating a complex series of relationships and characters.

It’s difficult to summarize it, despite it being so short, because it’s a masterclass in density of feeling and incident. As in real life, not much is happening, but beneath is a heaving mass of emotions.

Most interesting I found was the way in which the book functioned as a meditation on the pre-War world. These people had so much inherited wealth they could do whatever they wanted with their time, and they chose to spend it killing things. Is interesting to think if automation/AI ever ends work for all of us, what we will do with the time.

Also, just FYI, the Criterion notes about Colegate that she “may well be the greatest living English novelist, and yet many readers have never heard of her.” Truly, ladies, the playing field is not level.

THE NEW ME by Halle Butler

I liked this book for its rage. It tells about a middle class woman in Chicago who has cycled through many interests as she tries to find her path in life. Now, at thirty, she is stuck temping, and her aspirations are narrowing to just being made permanent at a job she despises. She starts to fall apart when she is let go. Before you feel sorry for her, let’s note her parents have been funding all this dicking around. It’s amazing how needing to make the rent can focus the mind.

Let me just give you this snippet:

In the windowless back offices of a designer furniture showroom, women stand in a circle, stuffed into ill-fitting black jeans, grey jeans, olive jeans, the ass cloth sagging one inch, two, below were the cheeks meet. They don’t notice theis on themselves, but they notice it on each other.

I wish I had never come across the words ‘ass cloth’ because now I think about it every time I see it.

A TIME TO BE BORN by Dawn Powell

This book is viciously hilarious in a way that suggests it is absolutely personal. Apparently, it is, written specifically as satire on a woman who was perceived as having (as the patriarchy likes to say) slept her way to the top.

In this book, the woman comes to a bad end, but Wikipedia tells me the actual woman never paid her dues. This makes sense: some of us have to pay so many dues it makes sense that some others must be skipping out.

Mostly this book is notable for the hilarious descriptions. On a busty woman’s blouse:

. . the yellow print now gracing her form, strained in a taut line across her back and then across her front so that bosoms popped out behind and before, above and below as if there were dozens of them, all crying for freedom

Or on this guy, who almost went bankrupt:

It was this snarling pack of debt which speeded (him) into the first World War and unquestionably caused him to become quite a military hero. He distinguished himself at Belleau Wood, and in Chateau-Thierry he went over the top as if he were chased by six process servers

Or an old man, with

surprisingly red hair that sprouted gaily from his ears

I ordered another book by Powell right after I finished this one.

THE VET’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Comyns

A mysterious little gothic novel about an abusive father and levitation. The arc of the story did not really work for me, so I won’t go into it, but the joy is in the world. Let me quote extensively from the first page, where the main character, a young woman, meets a strange old man on the street:

. . . I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. . . . In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half -covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.

What a wonderful writer she is! I am totally inspired by her biography too. Unlike many other writers, this is not because of the number of books she wrote, or the contributions to literary salons, or the generally impressive CV, and etc, but because she was poor (in the introduction she tells us what the flat she is living in costs to rent, I LOVE this) and married the wrong people and had tons of jobs and lived in multiple countries and wanted to be a painter not a writer. I just find it inspirationally and wonderfully messy.

A GLASS OF BLESSINGS by Barbara Pym

This is my fourth novel of Pym’s, and some say it is her best. It was I am afraid too subtle for me. It tells the story of a fairly contented married woman, who half-considers an affair. It turns out that the guy she considers is actually gay. Or at least that is what I think might be being implied.

It was kind of a funny book. Here is the woman, sitting in a beautiful house in a bombed out area:

It made me sad to think of the decay and shabbiness all around, and the streamlined blocks of new flats springing up on the bombed sites, although I supposed it was a good thing that children should now be running about and playing in the square gardens, their shouts and laughter drowned by the noise of the machinery that was building hideous new homes for them

And yet it was also kind of sad. Here she is wondering about her proposed lover’s ‘roommate’ who she had been told is his ‘colleague.’ She starts to wonder in what sense he is a colleague.

I remembered with a pang Piers saying that we were all, in a sense, colleagues in the grim business of getting through life

I have enjoyed all Pym’s other books, and think she is a wonderful writer, so this book worries me. I feel like there is something profound in it, but I seem to have missed it.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.

I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).

The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.

In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.