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. 

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

I couldn’t finish this book because there was so much whining.  It tells the story of an older college professor who slowly pushes himself out of his job, because he can’t stand the clamour around an allegedly racist statement he made.  He then has a fling with this female janitor which involves a lot of concerns about his erections.  It’s just like, snore. 

It’s not like I don’t think he has problems, what with needing to time the Viagra and his younger colleagues leveraging the scandal to secure their own promotions, but what I found annoying was the novel’s inflated sense of how unjust this was.  And not even that it was unjust, but that it ought not be unjust. It’s as if they are amazed to learn that life is not fair, and have no equipment for dealing with it  I guess that’s what’s called male privilege.

I so loved PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, but looking back on this blog I see I also hated the first book in this trilogy, AMERICAN PASTORAL.  I think I better give up on Roth.  Though let me end on a sweeter note, as I did like this description of someone giving up dating:

. .. I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience — or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism — to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.

Erotic professionalism. I love that.

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small” (Rebecca Hazelton SLASH FICTION)

This is a well-written novel with two parallel stories. One covers the AIDS crisis among gay men in the 1980s and the other is set thirty years later, with some tangential characters from that first story now dealing with different issues. I enjoyed each of the stories in themselves, a lot, because Makkai is clearly a gifted writer, but I kept waiting for the two stories to join up, or resolve somehow, even if only thematically. They never did. It was bizarre. It was like two traditional novels smooshed together for no apparent reason.

Also, and this has nothing to do with this novel, but it’s remarkably sad how many novels there are about AIDS deaths in the eighties for Americans and how few about Africans

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

For some reason, I always thought this was an epic poem, and avoided it accordingly.  In fact, it is an account of the author’s childhood, which was packed with incident and heroism.  Incident and heroism is good for epic poems, but not what you typically want in a childhood.

She spent much of her early life in a small town in Arkansas, in the 1930s.  I do not need to say much more for you to get the general idea re: racism.  But still, the specifics are surprising.  Apparently, for example, the fact that her grandmother was sometimes referred to as ‘Mrs’ was regarded as a rare mark of great respect, accorded to her because she ran the general store. 

Later Angelou and her brother go to live with her mother, and there she is, as an eight year old, raped by her mother’s boyfriend (that usual suspect). It is a stomach-churningly terrible scene.  She is so hurt she has to go to hospital, but she won’t tell what happened because he threatens to kill her brother if she does.  Her brother reassures here that he can take ‘anyone,’ and so much does she admire him (despite the fact he is just eleven himself) that she believes him and so tells the name of her attacker.  He is sentenced to a whole year in jail. Not to worry, as her family has him murdered the day he gets out.

She moves in with her father for a while, but after being stabbed by her father’s girlfriend (after a very strange trip to Mexico) she runs away, and lives for a month with a group of homeless kids in a junk yard.

After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself.  The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity.  Odd that the homeless children. . . could initiate me into the brotherhood of man.  After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to see myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. 

This bizarre translation of her time at the dump into a lesson in brotherhood is emblematic of the book as a whole. The summary here might make it sound like her life, and thus the book, was bleak and tough, but that is not at all how her it feels: it is fun, and loving, and hopeful, like there’s always a way out.  

In her late teens she becomes worried she is a haemaphrodite (don’t ask).  She approaches a popular boy, and asks the immortal words: 

Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?   

Apparently he would like that, and poor Angelous gets pregnant that day.  This is where the book ends, but given what I know about her, I have no doubt that she will transform getting pregnant in high school into something wonderful.  This lady is a boss.  It’s a high bar, in life and in literature. 

Side point, interesting overview of how she wrote:

She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.

Wikipeda

Sherry! Like I said, she’s a boss. She was encouraged to write the book by James Baldwin (who reverse-psychologied her by saying no autobiography could be art) and the first person she showed a draft to was Jessica Mitford, sister of the famous Nazis. This is some six degrees of separation

DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith

Here is a comic novel that has not been out of print since 1892.  It’s hard to describe it’s appeal, beyond that it is fun to laugh at the bourgeoisie, especially I suspect if you are the bourgeoisie. 

Charles Pooter has an office job and lives in the London suburbs.  Don’t we all?  He has worked twenty years in the same job, married to the same wife, and loves a little DIY.  His diary is one of small victories and defeats: battles with the housekeeper; awkward dinners with ‘friends;’ his son’s interest in amateur dramatics.  Here he is on housekeeping:

“I told Sarah not to bring up the blanc-mange again for breakfast. It seems to have been placed on our table at every meal since Wednesday… In spite of my instructions, that blanc-mange was brought up again for supper. To make matters worse, there had been an attempt to disguise it, by placing it in a glass dish with jam round it…I told Carrie, when we were alone, if that blanc-mange were placed on the table again I should walk out of the house

He also thinks he is hilarious, which is itself hilarious:

Gowing began sniffing and said: “I’ll tell you what, I distinctly smell dry rot.” I replied: “You’re talking a lot of dry rot yourself.” I could not help roaring at this, and Carrie said her sides quite ached with laughter.  I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook

It’s remarkably mundane, but he thinks it worthy of a diary, and like Peyps, thinks it will be read when he is dead.  I found it very funny at the time, but as I write this blog I wonder if in fact I did not find it rather sad.  I guess everyone has to try their hardest to assign meaning to their little lives, and who can say what level of meaning is ‘enough.’  Cult leaders have probably taken it a little too far. Everyone else, have at it, I say.

THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

I needed some cheering up so decided to whip through a Heyer. My blog tells me I have read fifteen of her books in the last ten years, and this one was as comforting as any of them.

AJAX tells the story of a bankrupt aristocratic family who, due to a boating accident, are suddenly faced with an unknown cousin as their heir. Their scheme is to marry off the oldest daughter to this man. She violently objects. Being a Heyer, you know this is 100% what is going to happen.

It does indeed happen. But unusually for Heyer it does via lots of social issues, including customs duties, Napoleonic wars, champagne used for boot blacking, and the invention of the spinning jenny. But however she gets there, it happens cheerfully and all ends well. If only real life could step up to the Heyer bar. We seem to have all the social issues with none of the happy endings.

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues.  This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big.  At least the father is looking to strike it big.  The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu.   (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID.  They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on  real life.  I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character.   This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth.  He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior.   His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree). 

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family.  Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them.  This casts the book in a different light for me.  I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives.   I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out.    I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left. 

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not coincidentally not a great time in my personal life, when I read a lot of David Sedaris.  And by a lot, I mean it all, and mostly in the early hours of the morning. 

Recently  I googled for authors ‘like Sedaris,’ and was surprised  by how few options there were.. I gave the options a go (Crossley, Burroughs, Rakhoff) and can report that the options are even fewer than Google suggested, in fact essentially nil.  No one is writing the comic personal essay like Sedaris.  And by no one, I mean no one.  Really, I find this remarkable.  Everyone has a personal life.  Most people have a sense of humour.  It’s incredible that Sedaris has, at least in my opnion, not one truly viable competitor.

I started a re-read of him, to try and figure out what he is doing.  My blog tells me this is the third time for FLAMES.  And three times round, I still can’t tell exactly what it is he is doing so well.  Here he is on glasses:

Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish.  Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment.  What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

And on smoking:

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up.  Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill, and then empty. 

I tried to map out a couple of the essays, and my theory is the success is the apparent ease: conversational and yet so artful.  In later years he has got a bit sappy, one has to hear about his feelings, and in particular his feelings about his father, but at his best: he’s quite alone in his medium.