Category: Uncategorized

ALL FOURS by Miranda July

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book about the menopause before, but here we are.  Enjoy this, the protagonist on her age, which is in many ways the central problem of the book:

“I was no closer to being sixty-five than twenty-five, but since time moved forward, not backward, sixty-five was tomorrow and twenty-five was moot.  I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to.  I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow.  Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decade, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season” 

‘The vast and total winning,’ we’ve all been there, LOL. 

She decides to go on a roadtrip from California to New York, which her husband thinks will be a good challenge for her.  About a half hour in, she checks into a motel and just impulsively decides to hang out and decorate the room.  She doesn’t tell her husband.  This part I loved.  The protagonist feels no need to explain or pathologize why she is doing it: she just follows her impulse. I found this wonderfully fun and free-ing.  She then SPOILER ALERT falls for a young guy who works at the local Hertz.  At this point, things get a bit more predictable, as we get into how she navigates having an open relationship.  I found this part a bit slow, maybe because it’s a story I feel I’ve heard a few too many times before.  Poly people are much like vegans in being overly willing to tell you all about it.   But even this was enlivened by the intense amount of menopause and more general midlife panic she weaves in.  It shows how few women have really been allowed to write across history, that this experience should be so rarely described.  I love the idea that it might be an opportunity to be more free, possibly even wildly more free.  Though I’m not sure I’m signing up for an affair with the car rental guy. 

SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell

A few pages into this book, I started to wonder if I’d read something by this author before. And indeed I had, THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, a memoir about the author’s mother dying of the Spanish Flu. What tipped me off was first the style, and second the fact that the narrator’s mother had just died of Spanish Flu.

Bizarrely, what the child narrator is narrating to us is a real-life murder from his home town. A man’s wife falls in love with his best friend, and leaves him in an ugly and very public divorce. He murders his friend, cuts off the corpse’s ear (?) and then drowns himself. The perspective changes from the child’s, to various of the adult’s, to a dog’s. The dog’s part is by far the saddest.

I admired this book greatly, but at the same time didn’t enjoy it. It was just kind of sad and I wasn’t sure what I gained from it.

PROMISE AT DAWN by Romain Gary

There are plenty of memoirs from people with daddy issues; here is one from someone with mummy issues. To give you a sense of the scale, please enjoy this section, which is where the book’s title comes from:

“In your mother’s love, life makes you a promise at the dawn of life that it will never keep.  . . You will go hungry to the end of your days.  Leftovers, cold tidbits, that’s what you will find in front of you at each new feast.   . . You will walk though the desert from mirage to mirage, and your thirst will remain such that you will become a drunkard, but each sweet gulp will only rekindle your longing for the one and only source. “

I have not Wikipedia-ed Gary, but I will be amazed if he has been married less than three times.  His mother is truly a titanic figure.  A penniless Jewish actress from Lithuania, she got pregnant outside of marriage, then drags herself and him across Eastern Europe for many years, determined that he will become a Frenchman, and not just a Frenchman, but a famous Frenchman in the best tradition of the nineteenth century novel: a famous artist (exact artform TBD), a decorated soldier, and a diplomat.  Incredibly, he is all those things, winning both the Prix Goncourt (best possible literary prize) and also the Croix De Guerre (major military medal). 

She is so sure of his destiny that I can only call her unhinged.  At one point, when the neighbours in their dodgy tenement in Poland get her in trouble with the landlord, she drags her son around to each one, haranguing them about how sorry they will be when this 9-year-old is an Ambassador.  Can you imagine: he has to go to school the next day with these people!  She is just utterly sure that his success will make up for all she has suffered.  He says:

“I had always known that my mission on earth was one of retribution; that I existed, as it were, only by proxy . . “

There is much to enjoy outside his mother.  At one point, he gives a little girl he has a crush on three apples, without ever having spoken to her, and then:

“She accepted my surrender as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and announced: ‘Janeck ate his whole stamp collection for me.’

Such was the beginning of my long martyrdom.  In the course of the next few days I ate for Valentine several handfuls of earthworms, her father’s collection of rare butterflies, a mouse, a good many decaying leaves, and, as a crowning achievement, I can say that at nine years of age . . . I took my place among the greatest lovers of all time and accomplished a deed of amorous prowess no man, to the best of my knowledge, has ever equaled.  I ate for my lady one of my rubber galoshes!”

I can’t even get into his time in the WWII AirForce, it being utterly hair-raising as he lays out how all his friends die in various crashes.  He also gives this awful snippet of the red-light district in Marrakesh, where he says it was not unusual for women to be subjected to a hundred men a day; and that “sometimes a girl, half-hysterical from over-work or hashish, would rush naked, screaming, into the alley .”  This is haunting, and I can only hope he is exaggerating.

SPOILER ALERT.  All through his three years in the war, he gets undated letters from his mother.  After the liberation, he goes to see her as quickly as he can, so she can see he is returning a second lieutenant, with a medal, and a book deal (i.e, he has finally succeeded, her life has meaning, etc). He finds she has been dead almost all the three years, and spent the last days of her life writing him hundreds of letters that could be sent on, so he wouldn’t know she was gone.

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

MONEY by Martin Amis

This was one of the more famous books of the 1980s. I cannot say I am feeling it. It tells the story of an author whose book is being made into a movie. He has an alcohol problem and rolls joyfully/miserably through various excesses of his private and professional life. It is a novel of voice, the exuberant voice of the alcoholic, and I think we are supposed to be shocked and titillated by how transgressive he is. A woman at a bar is a ‘big bim,’ he has lots of thoughts on black New Yorkers, etc. I just found it kind of snore.

SIDE BAR: I am 100% sure that this author has daddy issues, just on general principles, because men like this always do. I note that Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, was also an author and wrote the book LUCKY JIM, also a novel in the voice of a disillusioned man. This one, just as transgressive, is wonderful and heart-warming and made me feel free to hate my life. I am sure these two books are in some kind of dialogue, but can’t be bothered to Google to find out how.

STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide

A mystifying and annoying book which for some reason is very famous. Basically this guy and his first cousin fall in love as teenagers. He has to go away to travel and study, while she stays at home (because, gender). They embark on a long correspondence. Over time she gets more and more religious, and somehow convinces herself that what she really needs to do is sacrifice his love for her so he can more fully love god. And apparently the sacrifice is only good if she does not tell him what she is doing. I mean: there are a lot of weird issues here from this lady. Though the guy needs to take some responsibility, because this nonsense goes on for YEARS. Doesn’t he have any friends to tell him he needs to block her number? (Metaphorically only, as it is 1909). Eventually she goes off to die poetically in a sanatorium. So dumb.

Apparently the real Gide married his cousin after an eleven-year courtship. Apparently also he was a self-confessed ‘pederast’ and eventually ran away from her when he was 47 with a 15 year old boy (!!), at which point she burnt all his letters (that he called ‘the best part of me’). In the novel, his travels take him to North Africa, from where he writes to her of his love. In real life, this is where we know he discovered his really gross interest in young boys. I didn’t like this book, but I can see that it has a weird kind of emotional charge. I think it is because it is telling one messed-up story to cover the much more messed-up story that is actually going on.

THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver

A fun novel of the near future, in which America slips into hyperinflation and then economic collapse.  It was written with real joyful sizzle of wide-eyed surprise and horror, with a  strong vibe  of this-could-never-happen, which is quite fun for a Zimbabwean, to whom it has already happened. 

I have not Wikipedia-ed the author (who I know from the wonderful WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) because I am a little worried about how much time she spends on Twitter reading about questionable topics like Replacement Theory (snore). That said, there were lots of fun parts of this book. I really enjoyed imagining a world in which the young work low-level jobs (the rest taken by robots) and pay 90% tax so the old can live lives of luxury.  That feels uncomfortable close to likely to me.     

There is lots of juicy writing here.  Try this couple, who are well-off but love to bargain hunt:

Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal.  Caught up in money-as-a-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize.  Because the only thing that bargain hunting ‘won’ was more money.

Or this, about looking after grandparents:

After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside.  To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Or this, about someone regretting her choices before the collapse:

But assumptions about her angelic nature were off-base.  After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely.

I love that phrase –  ‘moronic double major.’  This book is full of the author proving to us how wrong we all are and how stupid.  I really enjoyed picturing her banging away at her keyboard.  Every page absolutely pulses with the rage of the well-fed.  It made me LOL.