Tag: fiction

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

STRAIT IS THE GATE by Andre Gide

A mystifying and annoying book which for some reason is very famous. Basically this guy and his first cousin fall in love as teenagers. He has to go away to travel and study, while she stays at home (because, gender). They embark on a long correspondence. Over time she gets more and more religious, and somehow convinces herself that what she really needs to do is sacrifice his love for her so he can more fully love god. And apparently the sacrifice is only good if she does not tell him what she is doing. I mean: there are a lot of weird issues here from this lady. Though the guy needs to take some responsibility, because this nonsense goes on for YEARS. Doesn’t he have any friends to tell him he needs to block her number? (Metaphorically only, as it is 1909). Eventually she goes off to die poetically in a sanatorium. So dumb.

Apparently the real Gide married his cousin after an eleven-year courtship. Apparently also he was a self-confessed ‘pederast’ and eventually ran away from her when he was 47 with a 15 year old boy (!!), at which point she burnt all his letters (that he called ‘the best part of me’). In the novel, his travels take him to North Africa, from where he writes to her of his love. In real life, this is where we know he discovered his really gross interest in young boys. I didn’t like this book, but I can see that it has a weird kind of emotional charge. I think it is because it is telling one messed-up story to cover the much more messed-up story that is actually going on.

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

WEIRDO by Sarah Pascoe

Here is a book in which the worm refuses to turn.  It starts off as kind of a love story, with a girl running into a boy she used to have a crush on in a London pub.  You find out that the crush was so large that she followed him – without his knowledge – to Australia, so she could manufacture an accidental meeting.  This is crossing a line, but okay, maybe it’s a quirky love story.  Then you find out that once she got there, she was very worried that Australia – the whole country –  might be being staged for her benefit.  Things get weirder from there.  It’s a really compelling, and claustrophobic narrative voice. 

I know it doesn’t sound it, but it’s very funny.  For example, at one point she says: “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my thirties, it’s don’t cut your hair while crying.”   It’s also an interesting meditation on obsession.  At one point, there is a parable about a monkey who puts his hand in a jar to get a treat, and then, because his hand is full, can’t get it out again.  The lesson being: 

“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.” 

I like this.

THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver

A fun novel of the near future, in which America slips into hyperinflation and then economic collapse.  It was written with real joyful sizzle of wide-eyed surprise and horror, with a  strong vibe  of this-could-never-happen, which is quite fun for a Zimbabwean, to whom it has already happened. 

I have not Wikipedia-ed the author (who I know from the wonderful WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) because I am a little worried about how much time she spends on Twitter reading about questionable topics like Replacement Theory (snore). That said, there were lots of fun parts of this book. I really enjoyed imagining a world in which the young work low-level jobs (the rest taken by robots) and pay 90% tax so the old can live lives of luxury.  That feels uncomfortable close to likely to me.     

There is lots of juicy writing here.  Try this couple, who are well-off but love to bargain hunt:

Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal.  Caught up in money-as-a-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize.  Because the only thing that bargain hunting ‘won’ was more money.

Or this, about looking after grandparents:

After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside.  To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Or this, about someone regretting her choices before the collapse:

But assumptions about her angelic nature were off-base.  After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely.

I love that phrase –  ‘moronic double major.’  This book is full of the author proving to us how wrong we all are and how stupid.  I really enjoyed picturing her banging away at her keyboard.  Every page absolutely pulses with the rage of the well-fed.  It made me LOL.

THE PUMPKIN EATER by Penelope Mortimer

There are many novels about unhappy marriages. This is a particularly good one. I had never heard of THE PUMPKIN EATER before, but I am informed by the Introduction that is among the first and most important of the twentieth century. I don’t know about that, but I thought it was banging.

Try this description: “His eyes twinkled as though hung in his head to frighten the birds away”

The book tells the story of a woman on her third marriage, with a large number of children. She gets pregnant again and her husband is not happy, so she agrees to an abortion and sterilization. The day she gets back from the hospital, she finds out he is having an affair. This is back in the day when cheating was more acceptable, but she does not find it to be very okay. To be fair to him, she herself admits she is unhealthily obsessed with children, and especially babies. She makes this interesting summary:

Now I realized how completely I had been absorbed by Jake. I needed the outside world, but had no idea where to find it. For the first time, I needed friends; there were none.  Over-indulgence in sexual and family life had left us, as far as other relationships were concerned, virginal; we said we had friends much as schoolchildren, busy with notes and hearts and keepsakes, say they have lovers.

I found this so interesting! It’s rare you see this idea expressed, but I think it is in fact very common for married people to be extraordinarily lonely and friend-less, and not even know that they are.

CHARLOTTE GRAY by Sebastian Faulks

Here is a novel about a female spy. It starts as a straight-forward love story, then becomes an espionage novel, and then loses its way for a bit, struggling to connect the plotlines while getting deep into French politics in WWII.

It’s engaging throughout, which is a feat at 500 + pages, and is remarkable for deep research and believable characters, even when the plot is a little shaky. I was especially struck by the presentation of how ordinary French people reacted when their neighbours were collected into railway cars and sent ‘east’. How did they react? Apparently they were not just fine with it, they actively applauded. It is pretty chilling.

Also of interest was the worldview of those who signed up to the ideas of Vichy France: that is, that German was clearly going to win the war, so it made sense to accept this early and get France the best seat possible in the ‘new Europe.’ One can see the pragmatism of this view. It is darkly funny how completely wrong they were. What I learnt from this is that when you are being ‘pragmatic’ (i.e., dividing up your neighbours clothes between yourselves) you better make sure you are making the right bet, because if you are not, you are truly left with nothing, not even your dignity.

THE SUITCASE by Sergei Dovlatov

I picked up this book in the week Alexi Navalny died. It’s like a very tiny tribute to that remarkable and heroic tradition of Russian dissent of which he was an heir.

It begins: “So this bitch at OVIR says to me, “Everyone who leaves is allowed three suitcases.  That’s the quota.” LOL! You know you are in for a good dictatorship story when it begins with encounters with bureaucracy. I myself have fond / horrifying memories of a certain 12 hour long queue to get a Zimbabwean passport in 2010.

The novel is structured around the stories of each of the items he was supposedly allowed to take out of Russia. It is both hilarious and sad. How hilarious is this:

Two hundred years ago the historian Nikolai Karamzin visited France.  Russian emigres there asked him: “What’s happening back at home, in two words?”

Karamzin didn’t even need two words. “Stealing,” he replied.

A great book.

BEER IN THE SNOOKER CLUB by Waguih Ghali

This is a novel about an Coptic Egyptian dealing with some pretty modern problems. It’s the 1950s, he comes from money, he gets involved in the wrong side of of the revolution, he moves to Europe, and he becomes poor in that really penniless way that only intellectuals seem to be able to manage.

He suffers a lot, and I felt for him, but I also wanted to shake him. One of his big problems is that he doesn’t feel like he is ‘Egyptian,’ because he is relatively well off and a Copt (so speaks French and English rather than Arabic). There is nothing that annoys me quite so much as this unthinking agreement we all seem to have that you can only ‘really’ be part of a country if you are part of the majority of that country. When he moves to Europe he also does a lot of suffering, because he feels that while he has been on some level formed by European ideas he does not fit in there either. This also makes me want to shake him, and say: it’s fine to also not be part of Europe! A hybrid person is still a real person!!

These are I recognize all the struggles of the colonized intellectual, so perhaps that this seems so clear to me in the twenty first century is because I stand on the shoulders of those of the twentieth, who did the suffering for me. Poor Ghali, he killed himself in London in 1968.

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell

In case you feel like you have not had enough pandemic content, here is something for you. It’s about the 1918 flu, and is based on the author’s own experience of losing his mother to it when he was just 10 years old.

After the loss he was made to go and live with his aunt, so he lost not just his mother but his whole world. For this reason, the book is actually less about the flu itself and more a sort of memorial to the ordinary days of his childhood just before it.

What is particularly interesting is to be reminded of what childhood was like when boredom still existed. They spend hours in this book doing nothing much, being with their own thoughts. It’s strange to think what childhood is like now, when children have so many books and activities and phones and television. Imagine having to generate your own content!