Tag: male writer

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

I always heard this book was about an unhappy marriage. In reality, it’s about the importance of legal abortion. It tells the story of a young man in 1950s America of whom everyone expects great things, himself included. He is not too sure what these things are, and certainly doesn’t work on anything in particular, and so ends up long-term in an office job he started as a stop gap. So far, this is pretty much the story of 50% of humanity.

In this case it gets really out of hand because his girlfriend gets pregnant. She wants to abort but he makes a big production about it so she doesn’t. They move to the suburbs, which they both regard as a sign of failure. Then she has another child. She tries to convince him to move to Europe, and begin the life they dreamed of (she will work while he becomes great). He is terrified at being given the chance to actually live the life he talks about so much, and so when she becomes pregnant again, and obviously wants to abort as that will end their plans, he talks her out of it again. They don’t move to Europe, their marriage implodes, and this poor woman tries to give herself an abortion at home. She dies. I can only say one more time: THANK YOU FEMINISM.

Side point, please enjoy this description, a warning to us all:

Howard Givings looked older than sixty seven. His whole adult life had been spent as a minor official of the seventh largest life insurance company in the world, and now in retirement it seemed that the years of office tedium had marked him as vividly as old seafaring men are marked by wind and sun.

THE GRASS ARENA by John Healy

Sometimes it feels as if every addict has written a memoir, like it’s one of the twelve steps or something.

I was recently noting how very many there were, and how similar. Here’s the book that shows I was wrong (first time for everything). It also shows something we often forget: how incredibly stitched up the book world is by people who were able to graduate high school.

THE GRASS ARENA is by a man who had an exceedingly tough childhood, became an alcoholic, and spent fifteen years homeless. It makes all sorts of more famous books on alcoholism look like a holiday camp, because they are all written by people who, at the end of the day, had parents in the suburbs to go back to. I have never read an account of what it is to be an addict without a safety net.

The grass arena is public parks, mostly round Camden. This is very much a book of north London. He tells about his daily life. He wakes up blacked out most days, and begins again from scratch to find enough money to drink. Let me give you a sample:

George and Ernie came back with a bag full of chicken bones. They’ve been down the dustbins again, back of the restaurants. Everybody welcome to lunch. Yeah, we’re all going to catch some horrible unspeakable disease. Not today perhaps. But time is on the dustbins’ side

He also tells us about his fellow drunks (not his friends, as he emphasizes: there are no friends in that community):

Alfie used to drink with a guy called Fingers Knox but Fingers got himself killed when he fell from the top to the bottom of the escalator in the tube. Poor old Fingers, that was some drop – he was a good beggar – lost most of the tops of the fingers of his right hand to the frost, a few winters back. He was a middle-aged Jock, used to travel out on the last tube to Edgeware every night to a skipper. He’d beg all the way on the tube going out, get a bottle next morning and beg his way back to the park. He was never without a drink. He used to take fits and get mugged often. He got nicked one time and the computer or something showed he was a deserter from the army in 1939! . . He used to say it was sad to have to creep and crouch and slink next morning after drink and that was why he always done a bit of late night begging. . . He had style. He would not keep jumping up at everyone that went past. He would wait. Then when he sensed the best beg, he’d put on his begging smile, beam in. Nine times out of ten it would be a fiver touch.

I find this very touching somehow, that this is what is left to posterity of Fingers Knox. The author eventually goes to jail for a long period, gets clean, and is eventually rescued from alcoholism by chess. Yes, you read that right. Someone teaches him chess and it transforms his life. He becomes a professional chess player. And then a yogi. What a man! What a life!

THE RUIN OF ALL WITCHES by Malcolm Gaskill

This is a fantastically interesting recreation of a single witch trial in 1651. I am amazed the kind of records exist that enable this level of detailed understanding of individuals so long ago. The trial was of a married couple. The husband had a temper, and was always telling people how he would ‘get even’ with them. This was not smart in a time when people were living in tiny villages, barely scraping a living, and absolutely buck-wild about religion. Meanwhile his wife was exhausted with having babies, resentful of being asked to bring in the maize while also looking after the kids, and seems to have had some kind of breakdown. It all gets out of control from there. Horses buck, ghostly children walk, imaginary dogs appear, and a meat pudding splits in two (a clear sign, apparently).

What I got from this book is that you should 100% not worry at all about anything that you cannot see and touch. It is sobering to see how recognizable these people are, with their problems (e.g., I am sick of these kids), and how very sincerely they really did all believe in imaginary dogs. It makes me wonder what imaginary dogs I am worrying about.

Side bar: I also learnt how incredibly ballsy these early migrants were. The main woman got abandoned by her husband and walked twenty miles with no money to Bristol to get herself on a ship to the ‘new world.’ Can you imagine the courage.

ORIGINAL SINS by Matt Rowland Hill

The field of memoirs on drug addiction is a crowded one. Well done to this guy for getting his book written and published, but I’ve got to be honest and say it’s a story that’s been told before. Not that that makes his suffering any the less real: the stealing, the betraying, the bulging veins, but it’s hard going when it’s been done before. Like I am always impressed by people who sit down and decide they are going to write about the first world war. Check it out: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT already exists. Best to retreat from that field in good order.

THE KRAKEN AWAKES by John Wyndham

I usually like the author John Wyndham, but here it’s like he was over-tired being his worst self. It’s super wordy, and kind of fakey, and people keep calling each other ‘darling.’ The premise is great, being about aliens hatching out of the deep sea, rather than deep space, a creepy and horrifyingly believable idea, but told so incredibly slowly that I can’t recommend it.

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin

Here is a completely searing 149 pages about the consequences of cowardice. A young American man meets a young American woman in Paris. He then meets an Italian waiter who he greatly, greatly prefers. It is the 1940s and he has spent many years trying to convince himself he is straight. Then he meets the waiter, Giovanni, and that’s all over: they move in together the first night. The agonizing that ensues is just horrifying. Baldwin is an AMAZING WRITER. Lets enjoy this conversation with his father, after a car accident:

“You’re going to be on your back for awhile but when you come home, while you’re lying around the house, we’ll talk, huh? And try to figure out what the hell we’re going to do with you when you get on your feet, OK?”

“OK,” I said.

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would. I understood that he must never know this.

Eventually the American beaks the waiter’s heart, and his own, by deciding he can’t face what constituted gay life at that time. It was sad, but then try this, his last big speech to the waiter:

What kind of life can two men have together, anyway? All this love you talk about – isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the labourer and bring home the money and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable little closet of a room . . and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?

It’s interesting how clearly men knew how really bad patriachy was. This was a huge personal cost to the man, but he was willing to do it: anything, anything, rather than be female. I get it.

THE CHRYSALIDS by John Wyndham

In this novel of the far future, a small rural community has made a religion out of ensuring that all human beings are recognizably human. This means some tough decisions about newborns with too many toes. That’s right, it’s the post-nuclear future!

I read this first as a teenager, and I note I feel much less worried now than I did then about the nuclear apocalypse. Largely because I am pretty sure we will get to a climate apocalypse long before a nuclear one. So that’s good.

CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY by David Sedaris

These are David Sedaris’ dairies from 2003 to 2020. This is not very personal stuff; clearly he is doing this more or less professionally, as prep for his essays. In his first diaries, he is poor and struggling; in these he is wealthy and successful, moving between his different homes around the world. Astonishingly, they are just as likable. It’s interesting to see what someone’s daily life is made up of, but it’s also interesting to see how much less enjoyable these are than the essays. It’s weird to see the magic that moves daily experience into dairies and then essays.

THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene

I am passionately fond of Graham Greene. I have in fact been rationing his books to myself, so I don’t run through them too quick in my lifetime. I picked this one up at random, and was excited, but had to stop reading it part way through. This was not because it was so bad – many parts of it were very good, because Greene can’t help to be good – but because it was not as good as he can be, and I did not want my admiration for him spoiled. The story got a bit silly – I think he was trying for a spy novel? But I’ll never know because I stopped before I could find out.

Greene lived for a long time in Clapham in London, where I also live. He also lived a good amount of time in Freetown in Sierra Leone, as I did. The overlap of people who know both must be pretty small. I enjoyed his HEART OF THE MATTER, a great novel of Freetown, and this one was very much a Clapham book. I enjoyed the insight into the war in particular:

London was no longer one great city: it was a collection of small towns . . . Knightsbridge and Sloane St were not at war, but Chelsea was, and Battersea was in the front line . . In Clapham where day raids were frequent there was a hunted look which was absent from Westminster, where the night raids were heavier but the shelters were better

THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf

The title – THEIR SOULS AT NIGHT – was a massive red flag. But I thought it cant possibly be as pretentious as it sounds. But then it really was. Now let me admit I am alone in this view, as this book is beloved by many. But myself I just though it was VOM.

It tells the story of two old people who get together despite some mild disapproval from their neightbours. Later they break up because the woman’s son, for no reason I can understand, wants them to. It’s all very spineless but apparently we are supposed to find it tragic.

I think my problem no. 1 with this book was it’s almost aggressively plain and simple language. Please enjoy the below and then gouge your eyes out:

In the evening they made another small fire and Addie cut up onions and peppers and put them in butter in the iron skillet and put in the ground-up hamburger and tomato sauce and a spoonful of sugar and Worcestershire sauce and a quarter cup of ketchup and salt and pepper, a sauce she’d made before they left home, and now stirred it all together and laid a lid on the pan.

My problem no. 2, probably my biggest problem, was how utterly humourless it was. I can’t tell you why, but somehow it just dripped with the idea that it was great art, and that really irritated me.