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. 

EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan

This writer wishes she was Sally Rooney.  So do I. 

Their settings are similar, being mostly about an Irish millennial’s love life, but for me it lacks Rooney’s clarity and intelligence.  It also has some extremely contradictory axes to grind about left-wing politics. 

Ava is teaching English in Hong Kong.  She moves in with a banker she is sleeping with, Julian, largely because she does not want to pay her own rent.  This makes her sound venal, and she is.  Meanwhile, she enjoys lecturing everyone about left-wing politics.  On the other hand, no one can say she is cheating Julian, because he emphasizes repeatedly that they are not in a relationship.  This upsets her, but as she says:  

I couldn’t even feel truly, sumptuously sorry for myself, because it wasn’t reciprocation I was craving.  My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine.  No one would sympathise with that.  I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

So the book wasn’t all bad.  It had some sharp and accurate observations such as the above.  But it really fell apart when it came to social commentary.  Here she is meeting Julian

People who had gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question.  Then, like ‘everyone,’ he (said he’d) gone to the City.  “Which city?” I said.  Julian assessed whether women made jokes, decided we did, and laughed. 

I mean this is just nonsense.  Generally people who have gone to e.g. Harvard will go out of their way to stay they studied in Boston and similar.  And in general young men will laugh at your jokes. It’s older men who struggle with that. So to me it was all came across as rather pat, academic social commentary about income inequality, by someone who has so far had rather a good time.   Take the fact that she refers to her teaching English as the whole “neo-colonial TEFL thing.”  This just drips privilege, as if it would be better for kids not to be able to speak the international language of business because it would make history neater.  Or try this, justification of her living with Julian:

Who would believe me if I said it made no difference whether I lived in his apartment or a dingy Airbnb?  Yes, I’d say, I am perfectly apathetic as to whether I spend most of my income renting a tiny room with people who hate me.  These things are quite subjective.  I could have soft towels and five-star dinners, or I could check my windowsill every morning to see how many cockroaches died there in the night.

What a heart-breaking analysis of the challenges of inequality.  An expensive Airbnb: I mean. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

 It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages.  Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be. 

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”  She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.

. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”

“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing.  “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues.  The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset.  The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy.  Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world.  They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. 

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor.  Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this.  Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . .  And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel.  Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

Colleen McCollough was working as a medical researcher when she found out she was making less than male colleagues.  Determined to make more, she turned to art.  Incredibly, this gambit worked.  This epic of an Australian family was a bestseller and spawned a very popular mini-series. (“Instant vomit,” according to McCollough).

While I can see many issues with this book, including extreme cheese and really stilted dialogue, I have to go ahead and confess: I enjoyed it.   Partly, I enjoyed the plot, with this much older priest falling in love with this young girl.  But mostly I enjoyed the setting.  For example, did you know that if you can shear sheep fast, (three hundred a day) you are a ‘dreadnought’ and can make as much money from betting how fast you can go as from actually shearing.  Also did you know that in shearing sheds:

At each’s man’s stand . . . was a circle of flooring much lighter in color than the rest, the spot where fifty years of shearers had stood dripping their bleaching seat into the wood of the board

Despite this being in many ways an old-fashioned book, McCullough certainly is unafraid to advance a specifically female view of the world.  She has a lot to say about domestic drudgery, and about how no one actually loves any of their kids after the fifth, and about how the men in rural Australia think they are good kissers only because the women are good liars. 

That instant vomit thing tips you off. This lady was a character.  She was convinced all critics knew ‘in their hearts’ she was just smarter and better than them.  She wrote 30,000 words a day, and virtually ‘never made mistakes’ because she had perfect spelling and great grammar.  And she died a millionaire many times over, so take that, other medical researchers

Let me note that I read this in my absolute favourite format, which is a very elderly second hand paperback, with browned pages, and as an amazing bonus it even had a weird newspaper clipping as a bookmark.  Enjoy the mysterious caption especially: “I used to be a teenage doctor until I discovered eminence.”

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

It’s rare I loathe a book, but here we are.  It has many good reviews, and was longlisted for the Booker, so I am the minority in this view.  But really.  First of all, it’s all very lyrical.  This is always annoying.  Try how this potentially good piece of dialogue is ruined

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling

Second of all, it’s all about tough men, and it pretends like it is supposed to show how terrible the consequences of violence are.  Meanwhile clearly this book is all about the romance of violence.  I don’t need to google the author to find out the author is a man.  It’s almost always men who like to spend their novels thinking about violence, and I don’t think we need to think that hard to find out why that might not be so interesting for women.  I just don’t need to live in their fantasy