Category: fiction

IN A SUMMER SEASON by Elizabeth Taylor

Here is a story of a suburbia.  A middle-aged woman marries a much younger man after her first husband dies, and . . . Never mind the plot, because as the introduction tells us, the author is ‘bored by narrative. ‘

Usually this kind of thing is RED FLAG for me, but Taylor is such a fine writer she makes it work.  Try this, of the teenage son coming home late:

Tom walked up the drive, treading silently on the grass verge, let himself in quietly and crept upstairs.  The house was night-quiet.  They were all as fast asleep as innkeepers of an afternoon.  They dreamt their innocent, middle-aged dreams and rested their aging bones

And try this, on his mother’s thoughts when this same son rolls his eyes at her:

They condescend, Kat thought.  They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish.. . They are appalled for us that we are middle aged.

Or this, on a son’s reaction to having to talk about his mother:

His fists seemed to be tightened in readiness, lest anyone should find her as absurd as he did . . .

It’s wonderful, sharply observed writing.  Particularly heartbreaking is our occasional insights into the mind of the family cook, who is really quite despairing on her life, but somehow carries on cooking.  Taylor uses the word ‘courageous’ about how she faces some potatoes in a way that made me want to tear up.

I got up in Wikipedia to try and figure out why a writer of this quality is not more famous.  I found no straightforward answer, but I think it is probably down to her being perceived as too mumsy.  She lived an almost incredibly bourgeouis life in the London suburbs, and I guess being the wife and mother of bankers is not as interesting as being an actual banker.  (Side bar, I am sure this was half the problem for Hilary Clinton too.  Fundamentally, people don’t want their mothers to succeed).  In any case, it is interesting to see about her process (thanks to the Atlantic for the information):

She said “I dislike much travel or change of environment and prefer the days … to come round almost the same, week after week.”. . . That steady rhythm allowed for her regular and admirable output—although she began to publish only when she was 34, wrote “slowly and without enjoyment, and think it all out when I am doing the ironing,” and regularly put her work aside to attend to her children and household (!), she produced 12 novels, four story collections, and one children’s book in 30 years

MAYFLIES by Andrew O’Hagan

This book got rave reviews. Myself, I could not see it. It begins as a story of teenage boys going to a concert. I could see that it was well-written, but I found it hard to follow: it was so very, very deep in British culture, in the 1980s, and in men, that it was almost incomprehensible. I suspect the rave reviews come from older men who remember this world?

The second half of the book is about the same group of men, but thirty years on. So I hear: I didn’t get there.

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut

Here is a spectacularly well-written book that I admired, but did not enjoy. It tells the story of a South African family, across four funerals, where the supposed engine is a promise made to the domestic worker to give her the deeds to the house she lives in on their property.

Let’s start with what was great. Here’s a description of the family home:

Beyond it, a diorama of white South Africa, the tin-roofed suburban bungalow made of reddish face brick, surrounded by a moat of bleached garden. Jungle gym looking lonely on a big brown lawn. Concrete birdbath, a Wendy house and a swing made from half a truck tyre. Where you, perhaps, also grew up. Where all of it began.

BOOM. Amazing, and if that does not speak to my minority I do not know what does.

The cast of this book is large, and it’s amazing how the author seamlessly moves between perspectives. He also has a lot of fun poking holes in his own illusion. One lonely woman sits with a cat on her lap, and then he tells us maybe she doesn’t; maybe he will leave her truly all alone. This is both annoying and fun.

Given this mostly seems to be compliments, I struggle a bit to tell you what I didn’t like about this book. I think, first off, it annoyed me that everyone in the book was either mean or sad. That’s just not true of real life, and it seemed kind of self-indugently despairing. Like everything is hard enough, I don’t need to deal with this ludicrously bleak world also. Omicron is quite enough right now. Also, it’s probably not fair, but this conflict about the domestic worker’s land never really got off the ground for me. It just seemed a sort of cliche attempt to make some kind of commentary (that other people have made far better) about South African inequality. Maybe he felt he couldn’t write a white domestic drama without foregrounding this issue? Maybe he is one of these old white people who mostly relates to race-based issues through the only back people they know, i.e., domestic workers? Okay, now that’s getting really unfair. I’m getting as mean as the people in this book. I blame it on Omicron.

WISE BLOOD by Flannery O’Connor

Here is a book that involves a man in a gorilla suit using an umbrella skeletron as a weapon, a hit-and-run accident that is not an accident, and some self-blinding with lye. Unsurprisingly, it is in fact a book about religion.

It’s a strange, Gothic Southern story, that I did not enjoy but some how admired for its insanity.

I guess what I took from this book is that human beings have a very high level of baseline crazy. Sometimes this comes out in belief in god, sometimes it comes out in belief in ghosts, sometimes in QAnon.

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis

I found Amis’ LUCKY JIM to be both hilarious and liberating. This story, like LUCKY JIM, is about an angry and selfish university professor, but this is where the similarity ends. LUCKY JIM was a cheerful and basically optimistic book about blowing up your miserable life. This is a bleak book about doing the same.

I did not enjoy it, but I admired it. Amis sticks doggedly to having a thoroughly unattractive protagonist. Self-involved, over-weight, anti-semetic, and those are just the headlines. He particularly dislikes women, despite spending most of the book trying to sleep with them. Here’s a sample:

A man’s sexual aim, he had often said to himself, is to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature that is the opposite of these; to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.

I struggled a bit with how it is that this unpleasant man managed to sleep with so many women over the course of the book. Perhaps standards were lower back in the day. Apparently Amis himself was a major philanderer, which occasioned the end of his first marriage. Interesting trivia, his second was to Elizabeth Jane Howard (whose Cazalet Chronicles I am so fond of, what was she thinkng ?!?), and when that ended he wound up living out his old age with his first wife and her third husband. These people GOT AROUND.

SWEET SORROW by David Nicholls

Here is an enjoyable book that made me wonder what is the difference between commercial and literary fiction. These are some first world problems, but what can I say. I did really spend quite some time trying to think how it was that this engaging, servicable story about first love so was utterly competent and so completely forgettable. I think it is on some level because the author is not actually fighting any battle with himself in writing it. There is no vulnerability. It is almost clinically well paced and emotionally balanced.

Perhaps though vulnerability is overrated. It was very funny. Try this, from the teenage boy who is our narrator:

As with people who had good teeth and confident smiles, I was instinctively suspicious of people who got on with their parents, imagining that they must have some secret binding them together. Cannibalism perhaps.

Or this, from him again when a new theatre troupe is introduced at a school assembly:

As we feared, it was another attempt to convince us that Shakespeare was the first rapper.

That ‘as we feared’ really made me laugh. These was one interesting insight in it though. It’s about how madly he fell in love with this girl:

I had never in my life, before or since, been more primed to fall in love. . . If I’d been busier that summer, or happier at home, then I might not have thought about her so much, but I was neither busy nor happy, so I fell.

I bet if we look into when we have most painfully fallen in love we might find that what drove it was less that the person was actually perfect and more that the circumstances of our lives made us need them to be perfect.

THE DUD AVOCADO by Elaine Dundy

Here is a book about how we should all be grateful to the women who came before.  It tells the story of a young American woman on what is basically  a gap year in Paris in the 1930s (funded of course by family money, try not to feel too enraged).  It is just incredible what goes on.  People make her dance with them when she has told them no, they expect her to ‘know how to cook,’ some guy announces that:

All tourists are she

And she still falls in love with him.  Wtf.  Later we find out he was trying to traffic  her into sex work but she still has fond feelings for him (?).  I mean how did these girls get anything done?  The issues are plenty. 

The book is fun and insightful. Try this:

It’s amazing how right you can be about people you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you

Or this, which I think is true about many people who begin, but do not finish, a career in the theatre:

The thing about him, though, was that he thought he was in the theater for Art, whereas he was really in it for laughs.

Apparently Dundy’s husband, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, encouraged her to try  writing a novel, as he thought her letters good, but was then horrified when THE DUD AVOCADO was a bestseller and instructed her to never write again.  Meanwhile he was cheating on her left and right and spanking her though she was not into it.  She began her second novel immediately.

I mean I didn’t enjoy this book that much but I am just amazed and impressed this lady held it together for long enough to get it written. Truly earlier generations were fighting some battles. 

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K Dick

This book presents an alternate reality in which the Germans and Japanese won the second world war. It has some interesting parts: for example, it imagines the internal struggles after Hitler dies (who would it have been: Goebbels? Speer? The mind boggles); it imagines what the Nazis would have done to African people; it imagines what it would have been like if Japanese culture became American culture; and so on. Sounds like a good book, right? But actually it turned out kind of boring. It covers a bunch of characters who are doing a bunch of things, but you don’t really believe in any of them and they all seem kind of the same person.

While the book was dull, the Wikipedia entry on it was certainly not. Philip K Dick led a wild life. First off, there is the five wives. That is always a red flag. The third one (who he later involuntarily confined to a psychiatric institution, but never mind that), was the one who inspired this book, largely because he needed her to think he was working, so he needed her to hear him typing, so he started typing, and ended up with THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE. He never made much money, and took a lot of speed, and then when he tried to get off speed didn’t go to NA or whatever like a normal person but entered a sort of cult (Syanon), and all this was before he started to have religious visions (triggered by light glinting off a stranger’s necklace). When he died he was buried under the tombstone pre-prepared for him 53 years before by his parents, who determined he should be buried next to his twin who died in infancy. None of the wives ojected. I mean: it all went on.