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LEOPARD IS A NEUTRAL by Erica Davies

Randomly, books have started arriving at my house for someone who lived her years ago. They seem to be complimentary copies, I don’t know why. I’m enjoying the weird serendipity of unchosen books. I rolled my eyes at this book about style, written by a stylist, but then it occurred to me that just possibly a stylist knows something about style that I could learn from.

She did have some good suggestions. One is, throw away things that you hope will fit one day or that you will wear one day. If you keep too much clothing for the better person you will one day be, it’s hard not to feel bad about the person you are every time you open the closet. She also suggested that rather than think about minimizing your bad bits, you should think about how to accentuating your good bits.

What I found most interesting about this book though was the imagined reader. This lady I guess got big on Instagram, so she has a clear idea of who her audience is, being women just returning to work after having small children. It really made it seem bleak. She kept saying things like: ‘you may have no idea who you are,’ or ‘you feel terrible about yourself,’ as if this was a widely understood experience. I’m really glad to not be very close to all that, because I’m not sure even leopard print can fix that.

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

This guy is seriously having a lot of trouble working through his parents’ divorce. 

I read his lightly (very lightly) fictionalized memoir, BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, a few months ago.  I enjoyed it so tried ANGLE OF REPOSE, for which he won the Pulitzer, a story of the very early days of mining in the American west.  Despite the apparently wildly different subject matter they are in fact essentially the same story: a woman who wants a home marries a man who wants to keep moving.  Rather charmingly, when asked if he had noticed the similarity he replied:

It never occurred to me that there was any relation between ANGLE OF REPOSE and BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN till after I had finished writing it.

It’s fascinating how little insight we all have into our own minds. How you write a 600 page novel and not notice that the main relationship is basically the relationship of your parents, about whom you already wrote a 600 page novel?

The best bit of this book were the letters, which the wife, a highly educated and artistic woman from the East Coast, wrote back to her friend (or more than friend), Augusta.  Here apparently lies a controversy, because these are in fact extracts from the real letters of Mary Hallock Foote, whose life pretty closely followed that of the heroine. 

The story cuts back and forth between the distant past and a present day author trying to write her story, apparently some version of Stegner himself.  From this I learnt that Stegner is a pretty hardcore Republican who doesn’t mind bitching about young people.  Also apparently not too much worried about plaigirism.

This lady was clearly a huge badass, having three kids in super dodgy desert locations while keeping up a career as an author illustrator.  I found it especially interesting to learn about the economics of the early West.  As the author puts it:

The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American.  It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London.  The freeborn America who works for one of those corporations is lucky if he does not have a family, for then he has an added option: he can afford to quit if he feels like it. 

Interesting to think that we’ve all always been working for The Man.

OHIO by Stephen Markley

I guess I’m not the first person to notice this, but these opiods are a real problem, huh?

I feel like I’ve really been wallowing in the lives of disaffected Americans. It’s remarkable how miserable people in small towns in the Midwest are. Everyone’s a failed high school athlete, a drug addict, a confused lesbian, etc. No wonder they voted for Donald Trump.

OHIO tells the story of four friends from high school who happen to return to their home town on the same night. The reasons are not super believable, but it’s a fun device for having long distant lives intersect, full of drugs and lesbianism, this book being what is it. There is also murder.

This part bothered me. One girl was drugged and raped in high school as a virgin, and developed a searing case of Stockholm Syndrome, which involved her becoming his girlfriend and ‘consenting’ after a bit of beating to all sorts of terrible things. She plots and successfully executes his murder. It is great. Then she gets caught. I can only assume this is because the author is male. I don’t think a female writer could have brought herself to it.

It’s a great in-depth, super specific tour of small town Ohio life. I recommend it.

THIS MOURNABLE BODY by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I bought this book after the author got arrested.  I wanted to show her some support, pathetic and $11.99 as it was.  I recall well when thousands of us marched in the ‘Final Push’ against ZANU in 2003.  That Push has proved lengthy, and this year only a handful of people walked, and that in middle class areas.  They all got arrested, including Dangarembga.

Dangarembga’s first book was NERVOUS CONDITIONS.  Because it was the first novel by a black Zimbabwean woman in English, it is sometimes receives the insult of being called one of the finest African novels of the twentieth century. It is one, but it is also one of the finest novels globally.  It is a coming of age story, and THIS MOURNABLE BODY is its continuation.

The epigraph is from Lorraine Hansbury

There is always something left to love

And this despondent reflection – on how much easier it would be to just give up – works for both the main character, Tambu, whose life is in a downward spiral, and the country of Zimbabwe.  Tambu is struggling in the country’s economic collapse, not least because she takes its impact personally. She quits a job where she is treated badly and

Spends much time regretting digging her own grave over a matter of mere principle 

I have definitely been there.  There is much that is witty.  Here is Tambu on her cousin, an academic, and her husband:

You begin to suspect . . that they found each other because neither possess the hardiness success requires, so they have dressed discouragement up in the glamour of intellect

It’s a bleak vision of a life and a country, beautifully written. It made me proud to be Zimbabwean. 

HONS AND REBELS by Jessica Mitford

It is a well known that home-schooling rarely ends well, and here is a prime example.  . 

She is brought up with her five siblings in a stately home in the English countryside by her deeply eccentric parents, describing her childhood as having a ‘rich vein of lunacy.’  Interestingly, one of those siblings was Nancy Mitford, whose comic novel THE PURSUIT OF LOVE I have read four or five times.  It is so hilariously strange that I used to think it was semi-autobiographical, now I conclude it is just straight up autobiographical, perhaps even toned down a bit. 

It’s not so much they don’t’ send them to school as they don’t’ do anything at all for them. The kids, already pretty weird, are left to their own devices, and just get weirder and weirder.

Jessica saves all her birthday and Christmas money every year into her ‘running away fund’.  No one takes her seriously but at eighteen she runs off to join the Spanish civil war.  She doesn’t get there, but she does end up marrying some guy she has known for three weeks. Incredibly, it is a happy marriage but not without some challenges:.   

No one had ever explained to me that you had to pay for electricity; and lights, electric heaters, stoves blazed away night and day. 

They end up in a lot of debt.  They move to America and are overwhelmed by the hospitality, comparing it to the upper class England they know:  “It’s inconceivable that anyone would ask them to stay unless they’d known them for ages, and probably not even then if they didn’t know their parents.”

And how involved everyone is:

Roaming the streets of New York, we encountered many examples of this delightful quality of New Yorkers, forever on their toes, violently, restlessly involving themselves in the slightest situation brought to their attention, always posting alternatives, already ready with an answer or an argument

The book ends abruptly with her husband off to fight in WWII.  She tells us, in one of the only footnotes in the book, that “He was killed in action in November 1941, at the age of twenty-three,” making this by far the strangest sublimation of grief I’ve ever seen in a memoir.

This is not her only tragedy. While she ran off to join the Communists, her sister Unity ran off to join the Nazis, falling madly in love with Hitler, and then, when the war began trying to kill herself and ending a vegetable. 

I am going to read the next instalment.  I really can’t imagine where this life is going.

SATISFACTION by Gillian Greenwood

It could be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I am here to tell you that you can judge a book by it’s author bio. The first line tells you not just that the author attended Oxford but exactly what college. RED FLAG.

The characters lead lives that are achingly upper middle class you could just vom. One character is impressed that someone wears white shoes with a summer dress without looking common. Apparently this is not supposed to be a judgement on this character, but just the sort of thing people do think about.

I picked this book out of the bookcase of an AirBnB and with such books I do usually like to roll the dice. Here I went with what looked like raging chick lit expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Instead I was unpleasantly surprised. It was both boring and unbelievable, which is something of a feat. Anyway the cold beer helped it go down

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone’s life.

I wanted to put that down in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder.

An amazing beginning. I loved Greer’s Pulitzer winning novel LESS, so had great hopes for this book, which is the story of a man who ages backwards.  Set in the early twentieth century, some of it was charming. Lightbulbs are described as “. . . resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard.” Or here is Max’s mother:

She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty.  The women who sat this way are all dead now. 

Leaving aside how poignant this is, how do you even do the research to know this is a thing of that period?  This sounds like a rave review, but in fact, surprising myself, far from actually really liking this novel, I could not even get up the enthusiasm to finish it. 

The key story is supposed to be his love for some girl.  He barely knows her, and lots of the novel descends into overwrought imaginings of her as the ideal woman.  Somehow this just struck me as very boring.  I’ve don’t know if it was because I had just finished THE HUMAN STAIN, but I just felt like I didn’t need any more of mens’ internal struggle with the idea of women who never actually appear. 

I don’t know if I’m overly woke, or what.  I don’t thinks so though.  I think I’m just very much feeling life’s brevity at the moment, so I’m all about quitting what I’m not enjoying.  So quit it I did, without worrying too much about my reasons.  That I’m not having fun is enough.  I strongly suspect that that, my friends, might be the beginning of adulthood.    It’s been a long time coming.

 

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M Broom

I wanted to like this novel.  It was rapturously received, and has an interesting concept.  It tells the story of the family home of the author, and so is a story of New Orelans, of African American life, or hurricanes, and etc. 

However I found it sort of dull and uninsightful.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read so many thousands of words of memoir and come away with so little understanding of someone.  Let me give you this taste, here, speaking of her parents:

As Simon and Ivory settled into life in the rebuilt house, time moved in the usual distinct increments (morning, afternoon, evening; weekends and weekdays), but after a while, everything new turned old and they stopped seeing time as composed of moments.  The years blurred.

I mean, really?   This seems a bizarre imaginative leap into the inner life of your parents.  One point of interest was that the author has two names, Sarah and Monique.    She says:

In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did

This I found to be true.  As a fellow Sarah, I can say that the name is wonderfully anonymous.  It gives away absolutely the most bare minimum about you, and makes you fantastically difficult to Google. 

CHERRY by Nico Walker

Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy. 

This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel.  It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks.  It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks.  It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.

Let’s enjoy first his descriptions.  A frat house basement:

 done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder

His fellow recruits in the army:

. .  there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room.  Fat kids. Acne.  Acne on the face.  Acne on the body.  Skinny kids.  I was a skinny kid.  I wasn’t strong.  We looked like shit.  We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television  . .

He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough.  He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags.  It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home.  In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin.  He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:

One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. 

And

I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation.  Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit.  With robbery it’s a matter of abasement.  Are you abased?  Careful then.  You might rob something. 

Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught.  He waits for them:

There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go!  The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared.   He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful

INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakaur

This is the true story of a young man who died trying to live out his dreams.  The dreams were kind of stupid, but it’s still kind of sad. 

Chris McCandless acts normal around his parents at his university graduation.  They don’t hear from him again till he is dead of starvation two years later.  He has plotted this from the start. Here is a letter to his sister:

. . .  once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live.  I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever. 

His parents haven’t abused him or anything.  They are very normal but he is kind of a little bitch.  The author includes a great quote from GK Chesterton:

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy

Chris wants to be in touch with nature using his own two hands and such implements as he finds romantic (e.g., rifles).  He wonders the country for a while until he decides to backpack into Alaska where due to some blunders (e.g., deciding maps are not romantic) he starves to death. 

Krakeur puts Chris into context with the various other dreamers, such as a climber named Waterman, who spent 145 days alone climbing some mountain and then lost his mind attempting to climb the next mountain with just a tub of margarine as supplies.  Krakeur outlines the type, young men with a monomaniacal bent, of which he says he was one, nearly dying himself in Alaska as a “self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life”  As he says:

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it . .

I don’t know who this ‘you’ is he is addressing but I don’t think they’re probably female.  It is quite sweet though that he thinks this is a universal experience. 

In any case, I have made a little bit of fun of McCandless, which is not perhaps very kind.  I admire his idealism, and his attempt to do something unusual with his life.  It is just very tough to swallow how illogical and contradictory it all is.  The love of Tolstoy, for example, who everyone knows talked a big talk about altruism while frogmarching his unwilling wife through 13 children and into poverty.  This idea that ‘man vs nature’ could involve a gun but not a map.  The idea that living without government is a great idea, as if millions of Somalians aren’t fully available to tell you that it’s not.  It’s all so silly, I struggle to be sympathetic.