Tag: fiction

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.

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 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

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.