Category: fiction

I enjoy a feminist dystopia as much as the next person, but in this case, maybe just stick with the TV show.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE is set in an alternative future where fundamentalist Christians have taken over the USA.  Women have been returned to exceedingly traditional gender roles, i.e., gross old guys get whatever they want.  They have wives, they have female servants, and they have concubines.  Sounds pretty sweet.  I mean for the gross old guys.  Grisly for everyone else. Atwood said one of her rules in writing it was that no atrocity should be included that had not actually happened in history, and it is depressing to contemplate how much of this future dystopia is basically just a re-telling of the past. 

It reminded me a bit of STEPFORD WIVES, in which ordinary men are given the option to have their wives’ brains rewired to produce a ‘perfect’ woman.  What makes that book so compelling is how believable it is that given the chance, most men would take that option. 

So, it was interesting; but I can’t say I enjoyed this book that much.  It was all a bit lyrical and literary for me.  There were some very questionable dreamlike sections.  The TV show cut all those bookish bits.  The book without the book.  Much better!

Here is someone who has a mental breakdown because she gets cheated on.  I don’t know, I know it’s not very nice, but my view is: toughen the f**k up. 

Partly this view comes from the fact that this novel refuses to give any character a name, calling the main one ‘the wife,’ and the other one ‘the husband.’ I always find this profoundly pretentious.  Even worse, at the end, it abruptly shifts to using the first person singular.  I mean: VOM.   And all this to mostly tell the story of this couple who moves out of Brooklyn to the suburbs because it is cheaper. 

That said, here are two things I did like:

One, a quote from an 1896 book on advice for brides:

The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to .which ‘a married woman can be subject.  Besides the false views of human nature it will impart . . . it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities

I have long wondered why I am indifferent to domestic duties.

Two, this which I find sadly and profoundly true:

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

This book reminded painfully me of the nightmarish self-involvement that is adolescence.  It tells the story of a girl, Lee, who gets a scholarship to a posh boarding school and spends the entire time behaving as if it is a concentration camp designed for in-depth examination of her choices by everyone concerned.  I mean check it out kids: you are not that interesting.  No one cares. 

PREP covers Lee’s four years of high school, and is an exhausting accounting of all the stupid things she worries about.  This includes even positive interactions with others:

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person.  And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: the less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement.  Also: the shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; . . . And finally: the better the original interaction, the greater the pressure.  Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction – I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

Eventually as a senior she starts to hook up with a guy she has had a crush on for a long time.  It remains ‘secret’ for reasons that are unclear to her. 

Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person.  All I can say is, I wish it were true. 

This did make me laugh.  It’s a lot of peoples’ experience, but it’s not something often admitted.

I enjoyed the book, it was very more-ish, but quite interestingly it didn’t actually go anywhere.  She got older, but no wiser.  I guess we typically assume that books have a shape and some kind of resolution (especially when they appear on the surface to be coming-of-age stories) but in this case, there was none.  For a while I found it annoying, but perhaps it’s just honest.  Sometimes I guess it’s true you just don’t change, but stay trapped on the same old hamster wheel. 

In this novel a man goes off to live his dreams.  He ends up dead.  Why is this so often the way?  I suspect on some level we don’t want to read about someone leaving their life to do something crazy and it ending well.  Because that raises questions about our own life.

Michael convinces his wife to go sailing for a year with their small children.  He does not know much about sailing, and his wife is resistant at first, and also at last.  But they do it. As the husband says, to the many people who raise objections:

. . I think there’s something wrong with the line of thought that it’s reasonable to defer your modest dream for several decades.  What are we, characters in a Greek myth?  Waiting for the eagle who comes to our liver every day because in a Greek myth, that’s normal?

SEA WIFE is about their year at sea, but also about their marriage.  At first your sympathy is with the wife, because truly the husband does seem kind of crazy, and he apparently voted for Trump.  Over time though, I had to say I came round to his side, because the wife really is useless and whiney.  She is horrified to find they are in debt, because as she explains:   

I never asked questions about money

As if this is a reasonable excuse!  How about you are an adult?  Like what is the guy supposed to do? She also is relentlessly lazy about learning to sail, and then when the husband gets Dengue fever mid-ocean she acts like a lost puppy.  I mean why did Emmeline Pankhurst even bother?

It’s been a long time since I read a book that had a straightforward happy ending.  I enjoyed it: it gave me hope.  Modern literature never ends on “Reader, I married him.”  More like: “Reader, I married him.  And that was the beginning of our problems.”  It’s like we can’t accept that there can be such a thing as happiness – it always has to be equivocal, and coloured by upcoming death. It’s like we think we are too good for happiness.

WRITERS AND LOVERS is about a woman in her thirties who is deeply in debt (student loans), recently bereaved (her mother), recently dumped (poet!), and has been working on her first novel for six long years, with no end in sight.  She pays the bills by waiting tables.  Clearly Lily King has waited tables, because there is a lot of detail on this, and I gained a lot more respect for what is involved in waiting tables. 

Here she is thinking about this ex-boyfriend, or was he a boyfriend, this was part of the problem:

You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet.  On the path a few people are holding hands, drinking from bottles, lying in the grass because they can’t see all the green goose poop. 

For all she is now so miserable she has two competing suitors, and much of the book involves her going back and forth between them.  She also receives rejections for her novel, and I was reminded how many people sacrifice hugely so we eventually get to those few people who manage to do something wonderful.  It’s like the gods of art demand blood.

 At one point she starts to have what appears to be a breakdown.  This for me is always a red flag: here we go with ‘dream sequence’ type writing, but we avoid this.  She sells her novel, she chooses her man: happily ever after.