Tag: USA

SELECTED STORIES by Dorothy Parker

Surprisingly feminist set of short stories, written in the 1930s. Not so fun as I thought they would be. I thought Parker was supposed to be a comic author but in fact these are acidic and rather sad, and deal with difficult subjects (like really difficult, like backstreet abortions), almost as if being female in the 1930s was not always all that easy.

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.

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.

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.

THE NEW ME by Halle Butler

I liked this book for its rage. It tells about a middle class woman in Chicago who has cycled through many interests as she tries to find her path in life. Now, at thirty, she is stuck temping, and her aspirations are narrowing to just being made permanent at a job she despises. She starts to fall apart when she is let go. Before you feel sorry for her, let’s note her parents have been funding all this dicking around. It’s amazing how needing to make the rent can focus the mind.

Let me just give you this snippet:

In the windowless back offices of a designer furniture showroom, women stand in a circle, stuffed into ill-fitting black jeans, grey jeans, olive jeans, the ass cloth sagging one inch, two, below were the cheeks meet. They don’t notice theis on themselves, but they notice it on each other.

I wish I had never come across the words ‘ass cloth’ because now I think about it every time I see it.

A TIME TO BE BORN by Dawn Powell

This book is viciously hilarious in a way that suggests it is absolutely personal. Apparently, it is, written specifically as satire on a woman who was perceived as having (as the patriarchy likes to say) slept her way to the top.

In this book, the woman comes to a bad end, but Wikipedia tells me the actual woman never paid her dues. This makes sense: some of us have to pay so many dues it makes sense that some others must be skipping out.

Mostly this book is notable for the hilarious descriptions. On a busty woman’s blouse:

. . the yellow print now gracing her form, strained in a taut line across her back and then across her front so that bosoms popped out behind and before, above and below as if there were dozens of them, all crying for freedom

Or on this guy, who almost went bankrupt:

It was this snarling pack of debt which speeded (him) into the first World War and unquestionably caused him to become quite a military hero. He distinguished himself at Belleau Wood, and in Chateau-Thierry he went over the top as if he were chased by six process servers

Or an old man, with

surprisingly red hair that sprouted gaily from his ears

I ordered another book by Powell right after I finished this one.

THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles

This is a novel about what happens when you take bohemianism that bit too far. Three vaguely artsy Europeans parade around Morocco in the late 1940s, sleeping with each other and others, staying in really horrible rural hotels, and exploring their existential dread.

I read it while in Morocco, so it was an interesting parallel kind of vacation. Mine was hair-raising in its own way (how much is too much wine at the all-inclusive?) but theirs was pretty intense too (at one point the protagonist complains about being offered a seventeen year old sex worker (i.e., trafficked child), because she is ‘probably at least twenty-five’).

The protagonist dies of typhoid half way through. He is too bohemian to have bothered to be vaccinated, so this is richly deserved. His wife then loses her mind and ends up getting raped and voluntarily joining a harem.

In summary, what drivel. I kind of enjoyed this book while reading it, but in retrospect I guess I sort of hated it. I can’t fault Paul Bowles for sincerity though; apparently he spent much of his life being bohemian in just this way, spawning many imitators, and died poor in Tangier in 1999.

LADDER OF THE YEARS by Anne Tyler

Here is a book about a woman who walks away from her husband and her three children. She has been feeling unloved and unneeded, and on impulse leaves and starts a new life elsewhere. Boringly, she ends up going back to them. I wanted the worm to turn, but it kind of just took a detour.

What I did find interesting was that the woman is only in her early 40s. I had heard before that in the past you were considered largely useless at that age as a woman (having done all that was required of you, i.e., reproduce) but this was a particularly sad and stark example of the problem. She really seems to feel her life is over. Today, most people of that age I know are just gagging for their kids to grow up enough so they can begin getting really crazy.

IN THE DISTANCE by Hernan Diaz

In this book a man attempts to walk from San Francisco to New York.  It does not go well.  It is the nineteenth century, and he is a young Swedish guy called Hakan, who intended to go to New York with his brother to make their fortune.  Unfortunately, he became separated from his brother on a city street (they had never seen a city before). He assumes they will meet on the boat they are supposed to take, and asks for the boat to ‘America.’  Sadly this is boat to the west, not the east coast. 

On arrival he decides just to walk it, like you do when you miss the night bus.  And so begins a bizarre odyssey.  He first joins up with a deranged gold digger, and then is captured, held hostage, and raped by a toothless prostitute, and then when he escapes, meets a naturalist obsessed with finding the very first creature to come out of the primordial swamp, then we have a con man who may or may not be leading a caravan to their deaths, then we have got some kind of murderous cult, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through but I will stop. 

On the one hand, this sounds kind of unlikely.  On the other hand, perhaps not so.  You have to wonder who decides to do anything so insane as move to a foreign country with a one-way ticket.   You would for sure get a much higher proportion of nut-jobs, and lets face it that proportion is not low even today.  Hakan eventually gives up, and spends many years alone in the wilds, before eventually deciding to find a way to walk from Alaska back to Sweden.  Clearly while he learnt a lot over the decades, his geography did not improve. I want to laugh, but really it was kind of a sad book.  The part that I think about the most is not strangely all the crazy incidents once he got to America, but the very beginning, in Europe – that first mistake – losing his brother on a city street.  Imagine a world without internet, and without much literacy, where you could – completely believably – lose someone like that, and then never, ever find them again.