Category: fiction

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.

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

 

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE by W. Somerset Maugham

I love Maugham’s book OF HUMAN BONDAGE, so I was excited to find this in my cousin’s bookcase.

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE is very loosely inspired by the life of the nineteenth century painter Paul Gauguin. It tells the story of one Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children and runs away to Paris. Everyone assumes he is in love with another woman, but in fact he is in love with oil painting. This is met with general boggling by all his acquaintance.

He paints furiously while in Paris, and almost dies of starvation there. He eventually takes a passage working on a ship going east. When he finds Tahiti, he feels himself at last at home, moves in with a local woman, and continues to paint furiously till he dies of leprosy.

This book is quite interesting in terms of considering what qualifies as a worthwhile goal for your life, and in terms of what it means if your goal is not one that anyone else understands:

Each one of us is alone in the world….We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house

.

So interesting, but, I thought, a little trite. The above is sort of like OF HUMAN BONDAGE, but on a bad day.

It also all seems to be written by W Somerset Misogynist. It’s only 217 pages, but manages all sorts of unexpected and distasteful discussions of his early twentieth century views on gender:

When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uppermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account – book.

Now, I never knew I could use my trusty account-book for encircling unwary souls! My small mind shall get right on that.

I am not surprised this has all come out in a book on Gauguin. I never liked those pictures of women he made, who all just stare out at you, half-naked, as if they had a secret and mysterious message, that message being BOOBS.

THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz

“Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?”
(Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol 1, No 49, April 1966)

And so begins this wonderful novel. Followed by, bizarrely, an entire poem by Derek Walcott, an important Caribbean poet.

This gives you a kind of sense of what a seriously loopy book this is, verging wildly from the highly literary, to pop culture, from English to Spanish, from Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to contemporary New Jersey.

Oscar Wao is a fat guy who loves sci-fi to an unhealthy degree, and is permanently in hope of finding love with a lady. His story is intercut with that of his sister, who flees the US for their ancestral homeland of Dominican Republic, and with the stories of his grandfather and mother, and of what made them flee the DR (as he calls it) for America.

Oscar’s grandfather was tortured and murdered by the Trujillo regime, because he refused to offer his oldest daughter up freely to Trujillo to be raped. Oscar’s mother, the youngest daughter, was thus left an orphan. She grew up and was eventually forced to flee the DR after getting entangled in a stupid relationship with the husband of Trujillo’s sister. Oscar’s own story eventually leads him back to the DR, where he finally finds love (with an elderly prostitute) and is eventually murdered by her boyfriend’s heavies.

Actually as I write it out it sounds like rather a miserable and melodramatic tale. But so sparkling and irreverent is the voice of the novelist, so sure the comedy, so accurate the observation – especially of the world of fat dorks – that in fact the book is a non-stop delight.

I was particularly struck by how Diaz managed to mix together the many aspects of his life – first and third world, pop and literary culture – into one coherent identity. This is something I certainly can’t seem to achieve.

The poem that begins the novel, after talking about Derek Walcott’s varied backgrounds, ends:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”

PS. Zimbabwean? Want to feel a certain someone’s not that bad? Check out Trujillo’s dictatorship here. He eventually died in an assassination, but I must point out he had serious prostate problems too. . . Holding thumbs!

JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby

This little book begins in a toilet.

Duncan has dragged his girlfriend Annie to America on holiday to see the toilet because he is obsessed with the musician Tucker Crowe, who has not recorded any music in twenty years, retiring soon after a mysterious incident in this same toilet.

Duncan and Annie have been together for fifteen years. Annie is beginning to feel that, just as she initially drifted into the relationship, she ought now to drift out of it.

A new album of old Tucker Crowe material is released, and, primarily to irritate Duncan, Annie comments on it in an online forum of which he is an obsessive member. This impels Duncan to cheat on her and then sort of half-heartedly leave her. It also impels Tucker Crowe, astonishingly, to contact her, and say how much he appreciated her review.

Not very believably, she begins a correspondence with Crowe, who eventually visits her in England.

You may find that my plot summary there ends rather oddly, and the reason for that would be that the book itself ends oddly. It just sort of stutters to a close. I was left slightly confused as to what I was supposed to understand about the characters. Perhaps I just need to understand that Mr Hornby suddenly realized he had to get to the cleaners before they closed?

I enjoyed the presentation of the dangers of an easy relationship, and of finding yourself settling without ever making the decision to do so. I also really enjoyed the character of Duncan, who is a wonderfully believable 40-something music dork.

The whole book however was a bit like eating unsalted popcorn. It went down easy and was kind of fun, but didn’t leave much of a mark.

HARPERS January 2011

A lovely article about Ralph Waldo Emerson in my favourite magazine this month. Here’s a quote of his to put in your pipe:

Days . . “come and go like muffled & vague figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nohting, & if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away . . . I find no good lives. I would live well. I seem to be free to do so, yet I think with very little respect of my way of living; it is weak, partial, not full & not progressive. But I do not see any that suits me better. . . We are all dying of miscellany”

Or,even worse:

“After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning”

FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen (contd)

The New York Times called FREEDOM “a masterpiece,” and I’ve seen it frequently referred to as the first great American novel of the 21st century. On the other hand, some critics think it’s not all that. I personally think it is all that.

I freaking LOVED this novel. As you could perhaps have predicted from my last post, written intemperately when I was only on page 38. Having now read all 561 pages, I’m here to report that FREEDOM is indeed a very fine novel. That it is also a bestseller goes some distance to restoring my faith in human nature that has been damaged previously in this blog by such painful episodes as PROMISES, PROMISES and THE REVERSAL.

FREEDOM tells the story of a marriage. It begins when Patty and Walter meet as undergraduates in Minnesota (Walter, I must point out, attends my undergrad Macalester). Patty is initially attracted to Walter’s best friend, the womanising musician Richard. She eventually marries Walter, as he is madly in love with her, and is a kind and caring man. They build a house in a neighbourhood on the up, have two children, and a relatively happy life. Patty struggles to understand her children as adolescents, is bored with staying at home, and has an affair with Richard. Walter becomes increasingly angry about what he perceives as the world’s descent into environmental cataclysm. Eventually the marriage crumbles. Patty has an unsatisfying relationship with Richard, Walter has a satisfying one with his young assistant, and then they get back together again.

This novel is wonderful in a number of ways.
1)It’s funny. See first post.
2)It’s accurate. For example, on a failing actress:

As if to compensate for her shortness, Abigail went long with her opening speech – two hours long – and allowed Patty to piece together a fairly complete picture of her life: the married man, now known exclusively as Dickhead, on whom she she’d wasted her best twelve years of marriageability, waiting for Dickhead’s kids to finish high school, so that he could leave his wife, which he’d then done, but for somebody younger than Abigail; the straight-man disdaining sort of gay men to whom she’d turned for more agreeable male companionship; the impressively large community of underemployed actors and playwrights and comics and performance artists of which she was clearly a valued and generous member; the circle of friends who circularly bought tickets to each other’s shows and fund-raisers, much of the money ultimately trickling down from sources such as Joyce’s checkbook; the life, neither glamorous nor outstanding but nevertheless admirable and essential to New York’s functioning, of the bohemian.

3)The man can manage a long sentences like there is no tomorrow. Or like he is a Victorian. See 2).
4)It covers an almost mindboggling amount of ground: cotemporary environmental issues, good and bad relationships, sibling rivalry, child-parent relationships, profiteering in the Iraq war, local governance, neighbourliness. It really is bizarrely both a domestic novel and a state-of-the-nation novel

The book comforted me by making me feel that life is long, and most people make a lot of mistakes in it.

I can conceivably see where you might find this book irritating: it is very much about middle class America. There is a big and slightly weird focus on sex as the ultimate determinant of a relationship, and on sibling rivalry as an explanation for all later relationships, which does seems a bit like someone might have had a bit too much therapy.

That said, I still thought it was wonderful.

NATIVE SON by Richard Wright


According to the back: “NATIVE SON follows the fortunes of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. Unwittingly involved in a wealthy woman’s death, he is hunted relentlessly, baited by prejudiced officials, charged with murder and driven to acknowledge a strange pride in his crime.”

Well, sort of. But actually this undersells this novel, making it sound like a straightforward condemnation of racial attitudes in America in the twentieth century, with Bigger the innocent victim of an evil system. In fact, Bigger is a complex character. He is presented as violent, and frustated, and I’m not sure we can describe his murder as entirely unwitting. He most wittingly continues by burning the lady in a furnace, to cover up his crime, and demands a ransom from her parents. He then goes on to rape and murder his girlfriend when he fears she will expose him. When the white woman’s bones are discovered in the furnace, he goes on the run, and is eventually captured, tried, and sentenced to death. However, without making Bigger in any way a saint, or implying he is not responsible for his actions, the book still manages to put Bigger’s society on trial, rather than Bigger himself.

This book was written in 1940, and made Wright the first best selling black novelist in the US. I think it was remarkably brave at such a period to present such a negative portrait of a black man, and a remarkable feat of writing skill to ensure we feel sympathy for him. This reader, at any rate, found it easy to understand his frustration, and even the sense of joy and freedom he felt once he had committed the murder. He finally feels as if he has some sort of control over his own life, and is at last a person to be reckoned with.

The first two sections, ‘Fear,’ about his life before the murder, and ‘Flight’ about his life after it, are beautifully written. Clear, compelling, gorgeously unpretentious (save for one terrible sex scene). The last, ‘Fate’ is not quite up to this standard. It covers his trial, and has some dreadful unconvincing set pieces, in the way of speeches to the jury, and a heroic but misguided attempt to have Bigger realise what has been wrong in his life in his last moments.

The back again, from David Mamet: NATIVE SON is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel”. Mr Mamet, you are still a mysoginist. But you are right about Native Son.

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES by Tom Wolfe


This is a famous novel of 1980s New York.

It’s main character is Sherman McCoy, a fabulously wealthy bond trader with a fashionable wife and a younger mistress. It’s all feels very apropos our current obsession with filthy bankers. There’s lots of shouting and making huge amounts of money for not too damn much in the way of actual work. However, they occasionally break off from this mythic money making to use a pay phone, or to send a fax, which gives the whole thing a sweetly quaint air.

One day, Sherman picks his mistress up at the airport in his Mercedes sportscar, and they get lost in the Bronx. They hit a young black man and leave the scene. The story follows the collapse of Sherman’s life as this incident is investigated and prosecuted.

It’s an immensely cynical novel. There is not a single character in it who is no driven by ulterior motives: the criminal case is twisted by all sorts of people (journalists, ministers, judges) for their own personal gain. This dark view of the city and the era is so insistent, and so powerfully stated, and re-stated, and stated again just in case we missed it, that I kept expecting Sherman to finally change, to grow, to provide some kind of climax or rebuke to this world, if only because it seemed artistically necessary, after 713 pages of gloom. Not so: Sherman is crushed by events, no doubt just as he deserves.

There are women in this book, and they come in two varieties: no, not the usual madonna or whore, but pretty or ugly. That’s pretty much it for the women. All the men, no matter how differently their characters are drawn, share the same view of women. That is, they like to view them, but only if they are under 25. All married men are by definition unhappy apparently. I think I can guarantee that Tom Wolfe is unmarried, or if he is married, that the lady is a good bit younger than he is.

VICTORIANA ALERT! Apparently Wolfe was inspired to write this book in part by Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR. He wanted to write a great novel of the city, of New York, and was inspired by the older novel’s presentation of London. This gives us an interesting perspective on the title. Extra points for naming main female character in Vanity Fair. NO GOOGLING.

TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

Apparently this one was banned on publication for being too sexually explicit. I think it should have been banned for being so incredibly boring.

I can’t really tell you what it is about, as I had to stop about twenty pages in. There is some guy. He is an aspiring novelist, he is poor, he is Paris. So far, so DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. And yet, from the same source material as Orwell, this guy has managed to write a load of rubbish.

Basically, the main character likes to have sex with prostitutes. One of these prostitutes (and we are not talking wealthy call girls, but starving women on the street) “loves her work.” Apparently, she is all body, and only exists in sensation. She does a lot of panting in her torn hose. What immensely craptacular nonsense. Her labia are referred to repeatedly as her rosebush. I’m sorry, that’s when I had to give up.