Tag: fiction

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

In this book, the general principle that you will feel better after a nap is here taken to its extreme.  A young woman is tired and miserable, so she decides to go to sleep.  For a year.  She does this by finding an irresponsible psychiatrist and medicating herself in dangerous ways.

This lady is a major hater, and much of the enjoyment of this book is seeing how she goes about her hating.  Let me make one extensive quotation to give you a flavour:

 “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep . . . They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. 

Truly it was hilarious.  There is lots of hating like this.  I haven’t read pure joyful rage like this since LUCKY JIM (side bar, I bet there aren’t too many reviewers connecting those two books). 

Of course the obvious question about this book is about the rent, and how she paid it.  Answer, rich parents.  You got to swallow that one down to enjoy the book, and it’s a tough one.  But there you go: rich people even get to have better misery than poor people.

This aside, I enjoyed MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, though fair warning, it does not resolve.  At the end of the year, in the last few pages, she wakes up, suddenly feels better, and then, for no reason, 9/11 happens. I mean, I nearly laughed.  Never mind, endings are hard. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

Everyone knows it’s much easier to write the set-up of a sci-fi novel than it is to satisfyingly resolve it, so in this book the author des not even bother to try.  Surprisingly, it works.

A family of four head to a rural Airbnb outside New York.  They go grocery shopping and we learn a bit too much about their sex lives.  Then in the middle of the night an older couple knock on their door.  It is the owners of the Airbnb, who have fled New York because ‘something’ has happened.

SPOILER ALERT: you never find out what the something is, and it doesn’t matter.  Things get very creepy.  For one thing, the deer start to mass into huge herds.  For another, there is an incredibly loud noise.  And then some flamingos arrive and the childrens’ teeth start falling out. 

I wish LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND had been longer. I wanted to know where it was going, because while it did mounting terror very well, it was strange for it to end, as it did for me, mid-mount. 

I also struggled slightly with how literary it was.  I love the author’s twitter feed (you should follow @rumaan) which is hilarious and contemporary and unfussy.  The novel had a bit too much philosophizing for me, basil chopping, and etc. 

And yet I would indeed feel very proud if I had written it.  Strongly recommend.  Makes you feel COVID’s not that bad. 

THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

Here is a book that confirms abundantly my suspicions about books with long sections in italics. Authors seem to feel like as long as it is in italics it is going to be okay for it to be sort of rambling and non-rational. There is only so much of this kind of thing I can take.

These italics parts are reserved for a developmentally disabled teenage boy who is being treated cruelly by the cool kids. The main character is one of these cool kids. Or maybe not that cool, because he is a debate star, and debate is not cool. On the other hand the whole thing takes place in Kansas, so who knows, the bar may be lower there.

In any case, THE TOPEKA SCHOOL is very much a boys’ book, packed full of boys’ issues. It was rapturously reviewed, so maybe I am missing something, but I just couldn’t get into it. Apparently the fact that in high school debate you are rewarded for building arguments you don’t believe in is problematic and speaks to larger issues in America. Or similar. I don’t know.

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams wrote the novel STONER, a novel that this blog tells me I read in 2013. So profoundly wonderful is this book that the author’s biography is called THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL. You will note that it does not refer to perfect novel(s) and this is because AUGUSTUS is unfortunately not a perfect novel.

Don’t get me wrong, it is much better than what most people could achieve on their very best day after a lifetime of trying, but still in comparison to STONER it can only be meh.

It is a deeply researched account of the life of Augustus Caesar, told through the letters of his contemporaries. Apparently ancient Romans were great letter writers – Cicero wrote eight to ten a day (did he not have a job?) – and so this is not as unlikely a device as it at first seems.

It is an interesting story, but for my taste a little bit too much sandals and togas and boys impressing each other. But perhaps it’s just that it’s not STONER. Sadly nothing can be STONER.

Sometimes one regrets seeing how high the bar can go, because it makes one realize how low it is usually set.

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

Here is a novel about getting your period.  It also involves some jewelry theft and desecration of the Glorious Dead.  

It’s 1923 and a single mother of five children gets so tired of their sass that she decides to take them to a First World War battlefield so they will be shamed into good behavior. Once in France she is bitten by a horse fly and nearly dies because before antibiotics everything was apparently serious. She spends the summer in hospital while her children run unsupervised around an elderly hotel that smells of “warm dust and cool plaster… Gaston the chef’s cooking, furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains.”  The hotel makes a business of the battlefields. They re-bury a soldier’s skull in the garden for the dogs to dig up before each group of tourists arrive, and make sure the machine gun holes are never painted over. Good behavior from the children does not markedly improve. 

Instead they spend the summer exploring their budding sexuality (older children) and the greengage orchard (younger children).  The oldest girl has a romance with someone who turns out to be a murderer and a diamond thief, which sounds about right for the judgement calls you make when you are 16. Our narrator, her 13 year old sister, is very jealous, through the thief kindly helps her getting her the female sanitary products she needs.  

This also sounds wildly unbelievable as I write it, but was in fact based on the author’s own experience.  What I really enjoyed about the book in fact was not so much the lurid plot, as the great charm of her vivid recollection of her siblings and the French countryside. It was somehow very sweetly melancholy as a bottled memory of a time and a place, that is now slipping out of human memory.  Only the very oldest people still recall that summer of 1923, and it was touching to hear about it as we approach 2023.

THE NONESUCH by Georgette Heyer

In this novel a wealthy man falls in love with the governess.  Based on the novels, I’ve read, apparently this used to happen all the time in the old days.  I don’t know what these governesses had going on but it was REAL effective.

Of course the other option is that this is all wish fulfilment, and that in the past, just as today, people typically ended up with someone who was in the same income, same age, and same level of attractiveness.  Also, and this is very important, same level of willingness to settle and decide they can’t do any better. 

Definitely I prefer the wish fulfilment. 

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.