Category: fiction

THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH by Raymond Radiguet

This guy has an affair with a married woman when he is 15; writes a book about it at 17; and is dead by 20. Now this is what I call living. That said, I am grateful for the vaccination against Typhoid.

This lightly fictionalized story caused a scandal on publication because the husband being cheated on is away from home because he is serving in the frontlines of the First World War.

The woman is 19, and she and the author have an affair of high passion and higher risk. He goes to visit her to talk about literature (a gossamer thin excuse). Here we are:

She liked going to sleep in front of the fire with her hair unpinned. Or rather I thought she was asleep. In fact, her sleep was only an excuse to put her arms around my neck.

They end up making out, and eventually, after she gives him a bit of help, having a lot of sex. However, they know their love is doomed. Not because she is married, but because she is apparently too old for him:

In fifteen years life would still be just beginning for me, and women of the age that Marthe was now would be in love with me. . . . I was too well aware of the attractions of youth not to realize that I would leave Marthe when her youth was beginning to desert her and mine was still at its height

Truly, we have no idea how long an uphill battle feminism has had to fight in the twentieth century. Meanwhile he has some other interests. Try this on for an extra taste, when he is alone with a friend of hers :

I did not assume from her silence that my kisses had given her any pleasure; but she was incapable of indignation and could think of no polite way of rejecting me in French. I nibbled at her cheeks, fully expecting a sweet juice to squirt out, as from a peach. . . . Her only gesture of refusal was to move her head feebly from left to right, and from right to left. I did not delude myself, but my mouth took this t be the response it desired . . . I was naive enough to imagine that things would continue in the same fashion and that I would succeed in raping her without difficulty

I don’t even know what to comment on this.

In an unrealistic and abrupt turn of events the woman he is having an affair with dies. In real life, she lived, and her husband spent the next fifty years trying to prove to everyone the book was fiction. He was eventually buried with his wife’s letters and a book that celebrated the heroism of the soldiers of WWI. I feel bad for him, but then on the other hand he did get that extra fifty years to protest his wife’s virtue, while the author got fifty years of being dead.

BATH TANGLE by Georgette Heyer

This blog tells me this is my 18th Heyer. It was exactly what I was looking for, a meringue of a book. It’s a Regency romance, of course, but an unusual one, as involved people cheating on each other, which I can’t think I’ve ever seen from her before.

Though the picture shows the coffee shop at the Wallace Collection, I mostly listened to it on audio book while doing DIY: ripping up carpets and sanding my Victorian floorboards. It is strange to think my flat is so old that the floorboards are almost the same time period as the story.

LITTLE EYES by Samantha Schweblin

In this novel, a company comes out with a small toy. It is special because each toy is controlled by another customer somewhere else, who can see through its eyes and move it around. It can’t speak. It’s a series of vignettes of the toy’s owners and the toy’s controller.

It sounds like an interesting premise, all about disconnection, technology, our loss of physical contact, etc. However, for me, it ended up not very interesting. Every story ends badly. In a shock finding, having an anonymous stranger in your house is not a great idea. In another amazing insight, we find out technology is not always positive.

I mean: really? That’s it?

I guess I shouldn’t say every vignette ends badly, because I didn’t get to the end. Maybe there was some kind of reversal, some how. However life is short so I didn’t find out

UNDER THE SKIN by Michael Faber

Here is a fantastically wonderful book with an amazing twist, so I recommend stopping reading this post right now and getting the book, because this is going to be full of SPOILERS.

The book begins with a woman picking up hitchhikers. This is so abnormal in the modern world that you can only assume she must be a serial killer. The hitchhikers do indeed die, and there is an extremely clever, slow reveal as to why. SHE’S AN ALIEN AND SHE’S ABDUCTING THEM AS A CULINARY DELICACY FOR HER HOME PLANET.

You’d think, based on this, it would be a science fiction story. It’s not at all. Mostly you are in head of the woman. Like many non-aliens, she hates her job, hates her boss, has a crush on someone who isn’t interested. At one point, some of the captured hitchhikers escape. They have been with the aliens for a month:

Removed from the warmth of its pen, it was pathetically unfit for the environment, bleeding from a hundred scratches, pinky-blue with cold. It had the typical look of a monthling, its shaved nub of a head nestled like a bud atop the disproportionately massive body. Its empty scrotal sac dangled like a pale oak leaf under its dark acorn of a penis. A thin stream of blueish-black diarrhoea clattered onto the ground between its legs. Its fists swept the air jerkily. Its mouth opened wide to show its cored molars and the docked stub of its tongue.

  ‘Ng-ng-ng-ng-gh!’ it cried.

She has occasional moral scruples about how they are treating the humans. But as she explains at one point, they “couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan . . . And when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.” It’s clearly, among many, many, other things, a meditation about vegetarianism, and how we train ourselves to not have compassion. And not just for animals, but for sweatshop employees, for children affected by air pollution, and all the other things that make the world go round.

At one point we do visit the processing plant, where one of the recently de-tongued hitchhikers writes the word MERCY on the ground. The alien pretends to a wealthy visitor that she does not know what it means, as she does not want do-gooders getting hysterical. And indeed there is no such word in the alien language in any case. Later, when things go wrong with a hitchhiker, and he is trying to rape her (luckily she lacks human genitals), she is terrified, and tries to remember the word. “Murky!” she screams. It’s not everyday you laugh at a rape scene.

The aliens’ home planet is some kind of toxic stew, where oxygen and water are expensive and must be fought for. Thus, much of the book is spent with the alien marvelling at beauty of the countryside around the A9 highway. It is tragic to see our ‘ordinary’ world through her eyes. She is amazed we have still got sky and sea to enjoy. For a little while, anyway.

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell

This is a book about a man who does not succeed in blowing up his life.  He is an insurance salesman, married with two children, and labouring under a mortgage.  (In a sign that things were better back then, the mortgage is only for sixteen years.  WTF is up with London housing)

One day he conceives a desire to go fishing, as he was an avid fisherman as a boy. He has not however fished since he was sixteen.  Here’s why:

In this life we lead – I don’t mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country – we don’t do the things we want to do.  It isn’t because we’re always working. . . . It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies.  There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.  Think of something you really care about.  Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent doing it.  And then calculate the time you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railways junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers. 

He bunks off from his family to go and spend a week in the village in which he grew up, which he has not seen in twenty years.  In his mind ‘as permanent as they pyramids,’ he arrives to find it now just an outer suburb of London, and not an especially nice one at that.  He buys a fishing rod and does not use it.  He sees an old girlfriend, and is horrified and how old she looks.  Fat and with false teeth himself, he assures us that men never go so far downhill as women do.  Sometimes the patriarchy is really adorably deluded.

He ends up going home, concluding there is no escape from his life.  The year however is 1938, and the book has hanging over it very explicitly the coming war.  You feel he will almost welcome it.

Side point. Orwell published a bunch of books you’ve never heard of, including this, and then in 1945, Animal Farm; and in 1949, the novel 1984.  Then in 1950 he was dead, at 47.  Imagine: he managed to squeeze in two seminal classics just before the end. Imagine what would have come next.  Imagine how close to the wire he cut it. 

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman

My third time through this excellent book, and I like it even more on the re-read than I did before.

It’s the story of a four month relationship between two New York hipsters, both aspiring writers. It tries to answer the age-old question, is it you or is it me, and the answer is, as it always is, that it’s both. Or it’s neither.

Part of the power of the book is that it is written from the man’s perspective, but the author is a woman. I have tried and tried to figure out what is so powerful about this book, and I think somehow this is part of it: there is a giant effort of imagination to see it from the other side. I note I am struck once again, as I was when I first read it in 2013, by this:

As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as it if mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a ‘rushed job’ or an ‘editor who’d mess it up anyway’ . . .”

I’m also struck this time through by the complexity. He meets the girl randomly at a party, some time after breaking up with her, and drunkenly goes home trying to figure out why he dumped her. He wakes up feeling happy. The last few lines are:

In a few days, it would be as if this night never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent email automatically saved to his drafts folder (“Dear Hannah … “). He’d no more remember the pain – or the pleasure – of this moment than he would remember, once he moved into the new apartment, the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he’d been up all night working.

I love this. It’s so true how hard it is to figure out how you really feel.

SHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart

About ten pages into this book, I felt like I was getting into a hot bath. I just got ready to seriously relax. It’s exactly the sort of book I like: one that gives you a break from your own life, by deeply involving you in someone else’s.

It tells the story of a little boy being raised on some quite rough council estates by his alcoholic mother. I would bet heavy money that this book, while marketed as fiction, is based on the author’s own childhood. There is a certain subset of books in which the detail of daily life is so vividly captured that it can only come from a child’s eye, and ideally a child with a ton of trauma. It’s Glasgow in the 1980s, a place and a time I’ve never given a second thought to, and now I feel like I have a real experience of it. It joins such bizarrely disparate periods as Trinidad in the 1950s (courtesy, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS) and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s (courtesy, FEAST OF THE GOAT read on a particularly hallucinatory 12 hour bus ride to Acupulco).

I won’t go on about everything I thought was wonderful about this book, but let me just leave you with this:

The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel

And that’s just taxi drivers! Imagine everything else that’s in there

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Abbie Greaves

Here is a book where everyone involved urgently NEEDS TO GO TO THERAPY.

It begins with a journalist discovering a woman who has been sitting at Ealing station every night for seven years, with a sign reading ‘Come home Jim.’ Clearly, this woman is the first person who needs to go the therapy. The journalist gets unhealthily involved in the story, and you better believe she also really needs to go to therapy.

The lady on the bench is called Mary and we learn about her first meeting with Jim, who was her boyfriend for six years before he left. Here is how he talks to her on one of their first meetings:

“You,” he continued. “There’s something . . . enigmatic about you. Quiet but fierce. Yes, maybe that’s it. Beautiful too, which helps, but that’s not it. I want to figure you out. I missed you these last few hours.”

This for me just drips with red flags. Who talks to anyone like that, and especially someone they only just met. Could it be all is not well? And indeed all is not well. I won’t give away any more than that, so as not to spoil it. While I didn’t quite buy the entire premise of THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, it’s a good engaging mystery, and I found myself sort of rolling my eyes but also turning the pages at a great rate.

Though let me say again: let’s all go to therapy sooner rather than later, and that goes double for men and triple for husbands.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

This was a re-read of this marvellous book about income inequality and spontaneous human combustion.

I didn’t love this the second time round as much as the first. But this still has me loving it more than most books. This time round what I concluded is that what makes it remarkable is the quality of the voice of the narrator. It’s weirdly, painfully, contemporary and disillusioned.

Try this, about her efforts to get a scholarship to a school for rich kids:

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.

I won’t write up the whole book again; the first read is here. If you are looking for something to read, I recommend it.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry

In this book some teenage boys have sex with a blind cow. And this is not even the climactic center of the book. Apparently this is just part of normal small town life in Texas. The author is famous for his novels that draw on his own upbringing in small town Texas, so I guess this is based on true events. This just goes to show you what I have always thought, which is that small towns are not charming as people try to claim, but in fact dangerous and creepy. (See also scarring movie WICKERMAN, but only if you want to be scarred.)

“We could go on down to the stockpens,” Leroy suggested. “There’s a blind heifer down there we could fuck.” . . . . The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. . . In the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch . . . It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the diary farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.

IS HE JOKING. At least in the play EQUUS this kind of thing is given the dignity of being a major plot point. Here it’s not. This story is about this young man, Sonny, who is graduating high school. He is having an affair with a middle-aged woman who is in a marriage people casually assume is abusive. (Sample: “I don’t understand how Mrs Popper’s lasted,” Duane said). Sonny drops her the second the local popular girl shows an interest. It’s a sad as it sounds. As a middle-aged woman myself, it fills me with renewed gratitude to be alive now, with my own income and my own Tinder if I want it.

Even all the side plots are sad: he falls out with his best friend, who then blinds him in one eye (?) before heading off to fight in Korea. The only apparently positive figure is the local poolhall owner, Sam the Lion, who looks after a young disabled boy called Billy (you don’t want to know how he is involved in the cow thing). Then he dies. Because this is the kind of book this is. It’s so sad it gets into the ridiculous. Everyone was lonely , everyone was not getting enough sex, or getting the wrong sex, or etc. Life is not all sad, just like it is not all happy.

Larry McMurtry is a great writer, so still I enjoyed it. But if you’ve never tried him, I recommend you start with his Pulitzer winner LONESOME DOVE (which this blog tells me I read a solid ten years ago)