Her dream of choosing and living a life of her own had vanished. Any life in which she was alone would contain the risk of encountering that pack o
Her dream of choosing and living a life of her own had vanished. Any life in which she was alone would contain the risk of encountering that pack of savages. Bitterly, she thought she was being unkind to those usually called savages, who would probably ever behave that way: only civilised men behave that way. Bitterness closed her in. She had lost her life. She would live out a half-life, like the rest of women. She had no choice but to protect herself against a savage world she did not understand and by her gender alone was made unfit to deal with. There was marriage and there was the convent. She retreated into the one as if it were the other, and wept at her wedding. She knew she was renouncing the world, the world that a year before had shimmered with excitement and allure. She had been taught her place. She had learned the limits of her courage. She had failed, she had been vanquished. She would devote herself to Norm, and crept into his arms as into a fortress. It was true what they said: a woman’s place is in the home.
This book - a seminal work of 1970s American feminism - covers a critical 20 year period in a group of women’s lives, from 1948 to 1968. In the first chapter, there is a splitting between the narrator and the protagonist Mira, and even though Mira’s life is the spine of the storyline, the book covers the lives of many women. The narrator describes it in this way: “I sometimes think I’ve swallowed every women I ever knew. My head is full of voices.” One suspects, reading a biographical sketch of Marilyn French, that Mira is also more or less representative of the author’s life.
Mira is a smart, independently minded young girl whose experiences with ‘slut shaming’ lead her into choosing the perceived safety of marriage. Like many women of her post-war generation, she marries young and becomes a mother soon after that marriage. She works as a clerk-typist to put her husband Norm through medical school, even though she longs to get a PhD. Her husband accuses her of ‘ruining his life’ when she accidentally becomes pregnant. After 14 years of marriage and two children, her husband asks for a divorce. Predictably, Norm ‘trades her in for a younger model.’ . When she adds up the hours spent in the service of him and their marriage, she is mocked and dismissed by him and his male lawyer.
In the second half of the novel, Mira is in graduate school at Harvard where she comes into contact with a variety of women and men of all ages. There is a lot of feminist consciousness raising, and there is a lot of the same old sexist bullshit. The daughter of one of Mira’s most political friends is raped, and then blamed by every element of the male-dominated legal system. Mira falls in love with a man and believes that she has, finally, achieved a relationship of equals, and then she discovers that he expects her to give up her career, have a baby and follow him to Africa.
Although this is Mira’s story, it is very much also the story of the women she meets along the way: Catholic wives whose bodies are worn at by constant childbearing by their early 30s and women whose husbands confine them in mental health institutions are as much a part of the narrative as Harvard graduate students. The first half of the book reminded me very much of Betty Draper’s world in Mad Men, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the writer of that series used this book as primary source material. The second half of the novel is both more hopeful and more depressing - much like reflecting on the year 2022, and noting how much has changed for women and yet how much has stayed depressingly much the same.
I’m not sure I would have made it through this book without the group support of other women. At times I couldn’t put it down, but overall it was SO painful to read. ...more
Princess Margaret felt most at home in the company of the camp, the cultured and the waspish. It was to be her misfortune that such a high proporti
Princess Margaret felt most at home in the company of the camp, the cultured and the waspish. It was to be her misfortune that such a high proportion of them kept diaries, and moreover, diaries written with a view to publication. To a man, they were mesmerised less by her image than the cracks to be found in it. They were drawn to her like iron fillings to a magnet, or, perhaps more accurately, cats to a canary.
This ‘biography’ brings to mind that expression with friends like these, who needs enemies? Princess Margaret seemed to exert a fascination over others for most of her life - and this gossipy bio is certainly full of anecdotes about men who fantasised about her - but she seems to have inspired little true loyalty. As the author points out, on a number of occasions, even the most obsequious of her followers seemed to relish the opportunity to get their own back in verbal claw marks.
I bought this ‘biography’ (yes, I feel that word should be ironically set off by quotation marks) last winter, mostly inspired by the 2nd season of The Crown. I remember reading an interview with actress Vanessa Kirby, who played Princess Margaret for the first two seasons, and she claimed to relish in her role because Margaret was always the ‘fun’ one and by far the more interesting of the two sisters. Perhaps that is and was the case, but I think that Kirby made the princess seem far more charismatic than she ever was in real life. If judging from this biography, Princess Margaret was the following: snobbish, petulant, spoilt, perennially late, vain, vacuous, entitled and a chain smoking lush. Also: very, very short. Her (lack of) height is dwelled on, and pointed out, to an absurd degree. ‘Poison dwarf’ was the not-so-affectionate nickname given to her by at least one Mitford sister.
Is it really so sad to be always a princess and never a queen? Is it such a hardship to have all of the royal privilege and very little of its responsibility? Is it so unusual to be unlucky in love, especially if someone is a spoilt little madam? I was certainly convinced that Princess Margaret was never terribly happy, and grew less so with the years, but it’s difficult to feel that her life was much of a tragedy.
Author Craig Brown claims that he was drawn to his subject partly because of her ‘ubiquity’: her tendency to show up in the indexes of nearly every personality of 20th century British life. It’s a ‘fun’ and promising start, but in the end, this biography added up to little more than a set of footnotes (in which the author often indulges). He plays around with the format of the biography in a way that can be both amusing and tiresome - ‘99 glimpses’, as the subtitle has it - but it never adds up for a portrait of any nuance or depth. Princess Margaret seemed a selfish monster in this book, and yet I couldn’t help but feel pity for her if this is all the ‘life’ she seemed worthy of. ...more
3.5 stars - a compromise between not liking this book very much (2.5) but finding it remarkably adept at conveying the protagonist’s utter misery (4.53.5 stars - a compromise between not liking this book very much (2.5) but finding it remarkably adept at conveying the protagonist’s utter misery (4.5 at least).
This book plunges the reader straight into protagonist’s unsettled, uneasy mind. Mrs. Armitage - as she is referred to for the entire novel, as if her marital status has completely supplanted all other forms of personal identity - is meeting with her psychiatrist for the first time. The opening salvo:
’Well, I said, ‘I will try. I honestly will try to be honest with you, although I suppose really what you’ve more interested in is my not being honest, if you see what I mean.’
Mrs. Armitage is in the psychiatrist’s chair because she is depressed and she cannot stop weeping. In an admirably compressed way, the protagonist fills in some of the salient details of her life: the rather dull, middle-class upbringing, the early marriage, the domestic chaos (several husbands, lots of children) during the unsettled and penurious war years, and finally 13 years of marriage to Jake Armitage. In the course of their marriage, Jake has gone from being an eager-to-please younger husband to a successful writer/producer who sleeps around. His wife has gone from being a person at the centre of a busy, all-consuming domestic life to being someone who feels superfluous to her own life. As if to underscore that superfluity, she spends most of the course of the novel removed in some way from her home, as it continues to function without her.
In the Penguin Modern Classics edition, Daphne Merkin contends that the novel’s concerns - ’The essential differences between men and women when it comes to matters of love and sex, the loneliness at the heart of life that can’t be assuaged by marriage or children’ - are still as relevant as when the novel was published (1962). I’m not entirely sure that is true. In some ways, the novel does read like a period piece; but what it certainly does well is convey the bitterness of a couple who still feel emotionally bonded, but whose bonds have mostly become negative ones: fear, anger, resentment and jealousy. One of the (many) harrowing scenes in the novel, and one I won’t forget quickly, consists of Mrs. Armitage attempting to force her husband into being honest about his duplicity, and his slippery side-stepping, with alternating admissions and denials.
Another arresting scene is the one between Mrs. Armitage and Giles, one of her ex-husbands. When he describes the wife and mother that he knew, with her ’great, energetic conviction that kept us all bouncing like ping-pong balls on an air-jet‘, he is describing a Mrs. Armitage unrecognisable both to herself and to the reader. It shows how much she has lost her way; how utterly lost and hollow she has become. With neither the role of wife or mother bringing her any sense of purpose or comfort, Mrs. Armitage is grasping for any sense of self at all.
It’s all pretty miserable to read, but I did admire how cleverly and completely she involved me (as reader) in her nervous breakdown....more
I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me anymore. I have become an exile from my own history, I say to her, I no l
I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me anymore. I have become an exile from my own history, I say to her, I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.
Rachel Cusk never explains exactly why her marriage has broken down; in any case, I think she would argue that ‘reasons’ are deeply subjective, highly arbitrary and ultimately irrefutable. Instead, she goes deep into how the breakdown of her marriage makes her feel - and precisely describes the particular devastation of divorce with its toxic cocktail of anger, pain, numbness and disorientation. The tone seesaws from the hallucinatory to the forensically rational, and one feels that Cusk sacrifices being ‘right’ for being as brutally honest as possible. Not an easy read, but anyone who has gone through the experience will certainly identify with much of what Cusk describes.
My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn’t be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth. I might say, by way of an explanation, that an important vow of obedience was broken. I might explain that when I write a novel wrong, eventually it breaks down and stops and won’t be written any more, and I have to go back and look for the flaws in its design. The problem usually lies in the relationship between the story and the truth. The story has to obey the truth, to represent it, like clothes represent the body. The closer the cut, the more pleasing the effect. Unclothed, truth can be vulnerable, ungainly, shocking. Over-dressed it becomes a lie. For me, life’s difficulty has generally lain in the attempt to reconcile these two, like the child of divorce tries to reconcile its parents.
There is an old-fashioned term to describe someone who is feeling irritable, out of sorts and physically jaded: liverish. I wonder if Tacy BrodessThere is an old-fashioned term to describe someone who is feeling irritable, out of sorts and physically jaded: liverish. I wonder if Tacy Brodesser-Akner was thinking of that when when she made her protagonist Toby Fleishman a hepatologist (ie, liver doctor)? That is about the only old-fashioned thing about this novel, though, which is otherwise relentlessly contemporary.
Toby Fleishman and his wife Rachel are trying to negotiate divorce, co-parenting and busy professional lives in the hyper-intense world of the top .001% in New York City. (Typical of so many people in the throes of divorce, both partners think they are doing the majority share of the hard work.) In this bizarre world, where private school fees for 3rd graders are $40,000 a year, and a halfway decent second home in the Hamptons costs 5 million, Toby Fleishman is made to feel that being a doctor (earning approximately $250,000) is not a solid enough contribution to the family lifestyle. About halfway through the novel, Toby meets with his lawyer to discuss the fact that he hasn’t heard from his wife Rachel in two weeks and that he is single-handedly managing the children. When she tells him that ”the system is freighted toward the husbands”, (really meaning the main wage-earners), the joke - which the reader may or may not see coming - is that Toby is the “wife” in this scenario. But is Toby - a successful doctor and a man - really equivalent to the “stay-at-home” wife/mother in the divorce scenario? Does Toby really ‘deserve’ to feel so sorry for himself? At first, it seems like the main twist of this novel is to describe a divorce from the man’s point of view when his wife seemingly has the power of a successful husband. In actuality, it is much more complex - and interesting - than that.
This story of relationship breakdown deals with the all of the usual subject matter of divorce: anger, betrayal, loss of security, loss of identity. However, the way the author tells the story - the changes of perspective, her very interesting device of a ‘Trojan Horse’ point of view - makes it feel very fresh and of this cultural moment. In some ways, all of the contemporary details (dating apps, for instance) just help underscore how certain aspects of divorce don’t actually change all that much. If the reader isn’t put off by the ridiculously exaggerated world of uber-rich New York City, there is a lot of astute emotional analysis layered in between the dark humour and misery....more
At the end of My Brilliant Friend, the first book in this series, the 16 year old Lina (‘Lila’ to her best friend Elena) has become Signora Carrucci. At the end of My Brilliant Friend, the first book in this series, the 16 year old Lina (‘Lila’ to her best friend Elena) has become Signora Carrucci. Wed to Stefano, the grocer - the son of the murdered Don Achille - Lila has cause to regret her marriage before she even leaves for her honeymoon. Her ‘new name’ is one she despises, and for most of the book she attempts to regain the autonomy she once had.
This novel covers a time period in the girls’ lives between the ages of 16 and 22. For Elena, these years are mostly concerned with the effort to get an education. She eventually ends up at the university in Pisa, and her social education develops in tandem with her formal one. She moves farther and farther away from Lila and the old neighbourhood, but constantly questions her ability to eradicate those formative influences. For Lila, this time period is consumed with trying on different roles: wife, lover, mother, boss, outcast.
Again, Elena narrates events from the sidelines. There is the sense that while Lila is ‘living’ life, she herself is only observing it. The narrative device of Lila’s notebooks are just another way Elena responds to the dramatic events of Lila’s life at a secondhand remove.
An important break in their friendship comes early in the storyline. Nino, the boy who Elena has loved and admired for many years, becomes infatuated by Lila. Like so many emotions and entanglements in this book, his feelings go back to their earliest childhood and he confesses to Elena that as a child he had thought be engaging himself to Elena he could also ally himself with Lila. ”I thought we would become engaged and we would all three be together forever, you, me and your friend.” The way that Elena responds to Lila’s co-option of Nino is representative of the many confused feelings and loyalties in the girls’ friendship. In Elena’s words:
”What was that deception but another of her fantastic moves, which were always full of risks. The two of us, allied with each other, in the struggle against all.”
This is a dramatic book in many ways, and at times Lila’s life resembles a telenovela in its big emotions (veering into melodrama) and reversals of fortune. But neither Elena nor the reader can second-guess Lila’s actions or dismiss her bravery. The final chapter is a dramatic break with childhood - one girl’s dreams seem to be realised, while the other’s are destroyed - but I don’t doubt there is a phoenix rising out of these ashes. The second novel just sucked me into the story even more and I feel totally compelled to find out what happens to these memorable characters.
”This is how my story of Young Woman as a Runaway Daughter became, in effect, the great battle of My Mother versus the Head Lice. And because my mothe”This is how my story of Young Woman as a Runaway Daughter became, in effect, the great battle of My Mother versus the Head Lice. And because my mother won this battle, the story was told endlessly, and it soon entered the canon of literature on domestic violence. The Americans had trigger warnings and graphic-content cautions attached to the course material, but otherwise it picked up a lot of traction elsewhere. It was taught in gender studies programmes, and women of colour discussed it in their reading groups (it was still a little too dirty and disorienting for white feminists, and it was perhaps a touch too environmentally unfriendly for the ecofeminists, and the postmodernists disregarded it because my mother’s telling ignored the crucial concept of my husband’s agency to beat me), and even those who forgot the original context of the story of the bad-marriage setting always remembered it as a fable about one mother’s unending, unconditional, over-conditioned love.”
This excerpt from the first chapter of Meena Kandasamy’s memoir immediately sets a tone of wryly humorous distance. It is also part of a declaration: from the first, the author is determined to claim authorship (not to mention ownership) of the story of her brief but brutal marriage, no matter how unpalatable its truths are for her audience. The author’s intellectual, academic, poetic and objective (she describes herself as a filmmaker) credentials are displayed from the first, and reiterated throughout the text. During her ordeal, Kandasamy struggles to hold onto her sense of herself as a smart and savvy woman. But it those very attributes which makes her story harder to comprehend - not just for the reader, but also for her parents, her friends and most importantly, herself. How does the well-educated “feminist” (also described, by her husband, as “petit-bourgeois” and “middle-class”) become trapped in domestic violence? What are the reasons (practical and mental) which keep her from escaping this personal hell?
Although Kandasamy’s use of language is clever, playful and beautiful - as befits a poet - she does not spare the reader from the brutal realities of emotional and physical coercion. This is a difficult book to read, despite its humour and distancing techniques. It is an important testimony, but I did not ‘enjoy’ much of it - except perhaps, the first chapter. Not that enjoyment is really the point. 3.5 stars
This is not a ‘haunted house’ story in the usual sense of ghosts or the gothic genre, but it would be a challenge to think of a fictional house more dThis is not a ‘haunted house’ story in the usual sense of ghosts or the gothic genre, but it would be a challenge to think of a fictional house more decrepit, or with inhabitants more trapped, miserable and hopeless. Death stalks the pages from the first chapter, but really this book is about a culture so deformed and ugly that it twists and torments the souls of everyone unfortunate enough to be a part of it.
The book is set in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) before the fight for independence. The culture is one of apartheid just a baby step away from outright slavery. The main characters are Dick and Mary Turner, and Lessing is incredibly effective at making them pitiable and strangely sympathetic and yet utterly unlikeable. We understand that they are victims of this twisted, unhappy culture, just as much as the native Africans.
Dick Turner is a farmer so inept and luckless that the other local white farmers call him ‘Jonah’. His wife Mary grew up in the bush, the daughter of a similarly unsuccessful farming father, but after an escape into town - where she works happily as a secretary for more than a decade - Mary makes the quixotic decision to marry this man whom she does not love. Then they are trapped together, along with their native black ‘help’, in an emotional and physical situation which grows more dire with every passing year.
Mary is deeply afraid of sexuality - she finds it repugnant - and Lessing links her emotional sterility and lack of fertility to the treatment of the land and its workers. Violence and fear are inextricably linked, and the latter is the inevitable offspring of the former.
I realise that I’m making this novel sound rather gruesome, and it is a horror, but what also must be emphasised is the incredible power of it. Lessing creates something so atmospheric, albeit dark, and I was completely swept up in the inexorably strong current of her narrative. ...more
This is at least the third time I’ve read The Pursuit of Love - the Mitford novel which remains my favourite, and for me, the quintessence of the MitfThis is at least the third time I’ve read The Pursuit of Love - the Mitford novel which remains my favourite, and for me, the quintessence of the Mitford charm and style. I vividly remember the first time I read it: it was a foul October’s day in 1999 and we had just returned to England after three years of summer in the Caribbean. The descriptions of the freezing old house in Gloucestershire - and Linda Radlettt retreating to the “Hons Cupboard” in her fur coat - was somehow immensely cheering. After reading this novel, and its companion piece Love in a Cold Climate, I embarked on a Mitford-reading binge which took in the lives of nearly all of the sisters.
I think that most readers who are attracted to these English novels - not so much of manners as artistoratic eccentricity - are invariably curious about the Mitford family history. This one is the most obviously autobiographical, although Nancy jumbles a lot of the details - and there are aspects of Diana’s, Deborah’s and Jessica’s life in the protagonist Linda Radlett. Funnily enough, it’s always Uncle Matthew who I remember best. He represents everything I dislike about English aristoracrats (the snobbery! the nationalistic, xenophobic arrogance!) and yet he is so fierce and funny and so vividly drawn. He also gets some of the best lines, and I never fail to be amused when he collapses into tears upon watching Romeo and Juliet for the first time. (“It’s all the damned padre’s fault!”)
I tend to forget about Fanny (the Radlett cousin who narrates the novel), and even more so her step-uncle Davey. And yet Davey is a wonderful character, too, and every bit as eccentric as Uncle Matthew.
Perhaps I don’t love this novel as much as I did when I first discovered it, nearly twenty years ago, but it is still a great comfort read and a true sentimental favourite. Mitford can be very perspicacious, (for instance, when she describes Linda’s first husband as her “Bottom,” an allusion from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but she has the lightest of touches in this homage to the bygone world of pre-WWII England. ...more
This is my first book by Patrick Gale, but it definitely won’t be my last. I saw him at the Cambridge Literary Festival this past weekend (Nov 25, 201This is my first book by Patrick Gale, but it definitely won’t be my last. I saw him at the Cambridge Literary Festival this past weekend (Nov 25, 2018) and he was an absolute charmer. A good friend of mine has been raving about Notes from an Exhibition for years, and I just regret that I didn’t open that book (which I own) much earlier.
Gale described this book as having two literary “fairy godmothers hovering over” - the two being Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. The Ballet Shoes reference is fairly obvious, and is indeed cited in the narration of the book itself: “Since his father’s ban, he had often read his mother’s old copy of Ballet Shoes, no longer enviously dreaming of ballet classes but simply reading ballet as a tidy metaphor for any life of art and discipline.” As a small child, Eustace (the book’s protagonist) had longed to study ballet. Wary of this sign of effeminacy, his parents had steered him towards music - first with unsatisfactory clarinet lessons before he then discovers his true love with the cello. In his talk, Gale mentioned that he believes that music, ballet and gymnastics produce a special kind of resilience in their practioners “because you know you will probably fail.” As a cellist himself, Gale believes that being good at music (but not quite good enough) helped him develop the resilience and discipline necessary for becoming a writer. I’ve not read The Go-Between, but I believe that parallel has to do with the loss of innocence (and discovery of sexuality) and the way the story unfolds.
This is a coming-of-age story, and it was clear from his talk that Gale has mined various aspects of his own childhood (and not just the musical bits) for Eustace’s story. Set in Weston-super-Mare during the 1970s, Eustace lives in a rather grand but faded house on the Royal Crescent which has been turned into a shabby-genteel nursing home. Along with his parents - who have a nervy and strained marriage - he lives with his maternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother. Various things mark Eustace out as “different” from the other boys at his private school - not least of all are his name, his hopelessness at sports and his homosexuality. The development of his musical dedication runs alongside his growing awareness of his own sexuality in a plot line which yields a few surprises, particularly in the last third.
Most of the book is actually told in flashback, along with the accompaniment of music that had been important to Eustace at various stages of his life. When the book begins, Eustace is a 50ish man dealing with the twin shocks of discovering that he has fallen in love (in an entirely online relationship) and that he has to receive radioactive treatment for thyroid cancer. Although there is some interest in discovering what happens to Eustace as a grown man, I wasn’t completely convinced that this “framing” was even necessary to the main plot line - which actually focuses on Eustace’s life between the ages of 8 and 16.
One of Gale’s strengths is characterisation - and he creates appealingly flawed characters, both minor and major, in this novel. Some of my favourites included his grandmother, his best friend Vernon (who loves Trollope, and acts as a carer to his father), Louis and Ebrahim (who give him “discreet lessons” in being gay) and the two female music teachers who inspire him. His mother is selfish and even a bit monstrous, and his father is almost hopelessly weak, but both of them seemed real and never fall into caricature.
I also loved his writing style - which is fluid, funny and full of just enough detail to really make every scene come alive.
4.5 stars for a thoroughly entertaining read....more
”And what do the rules say?” “Put your addict inside, once he’s well and truly hooked.”
In this time-travel historical novel, set in both familiar and u”And what do the rules say?” “Put your addict inside, once he’s well and truly hooked.”
In this time-travel historical novel, set in both familiar and unfamiliar Cornwall territory, du Maurier makes her protagonist an addict of a most unusual kind. Neither drink nor the usual kind of drugs have Dick in their grip; instead, Dick has become addicted to escapism. Aided and abetted by his best friend Magnus, a bachelor scientist, Dick has been experimenting with a kind of brain serum which allows him to walk (temporarily) in the past: specifically in the past of 14th century Cornwall.
The novel takes a while to get going, unusually for du Maurier. On Dick’s first foray into the past, she introduces way too many characters and the various intrigues of suspicious death, dubious monks, extramarital liaisons, power plays and an interrelated family tree that is particularly difficult to sort out. (I realise that I’m making it sounds more interesting than it actually is; probably because we are ‘fed’ the historical plot in bits and pieces. I finally did disentangle the relationships and some of the intrigue, but felt at least half the time that I really could not be bothered. It actually does not make much difference to the plot.) Meanwhile, in Dick’s real world, his private male sanctum (Magnus’s Cornall house, on loan) has been invaded by his American wife Vita and her sons from a former marriage. There is a lot of “darling” going on between Dick and Vita, but little true warmth, communication or pleasure in each other’s company. It’s one of the stiff, sterile marital relationships that du Maurier does so well, but it’s hard to warm to either character - nor delight in their villainy (as one does with Maxim du Winter or Joss Merlyn). There seems to be little point to their marriage, and Dick spends most of his time sneaking around, hiding from Vita and trying to drink his potions and escape into the past.
One of the problems with the book, for me, is that I wasn’t all that convinced by the historical setting. I just couldn’t “buy” that Dick kept risking his health, and even his life, to keep returning there. There’s a beautiful woman called Isolda who he is attracted to, partly through his historical alter ego Roger (a steward to one of the powerful families in the area), but it’s an unconvincing romantic attraction.
I did eventually get involved in the book, but it really lacked the compulsive readability of du Maurier classics like Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel. There were enough dramatic developments in the second half to keep me reading, but it’s not a book that I feel all that bothered to discuss. At her best, du Maurier writes a wonderfully dark and ambiguous tale; despite (or maybe because of) the time-travelling device, this one just felt like a stop-start journey with boring characters and indifferent scenery....more
This book is set in the early 60s, and even though it was written in the 21st century I believe that McEwan very much wanted it to be understood as a This book is set in the early 60s, and even though it was written in the 21st century I believe that McEwan very much wanted it to be understood as a ‘period piece’ - as a story that perhaps could only have happened it its particular time. ”This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of the cure.”
The characters are 22, fresh from university and somewhat suspended in that uncertain time between adolescence and adulthood. They are unsure about how to begin the next phase of their lives, and falling in love with each other presents itself as a partial solution to that problem. The entire book, slight and yet so carefully detailed, focuses on the wedding night of Florence and Edward - with flashbacks describing how they fell in love, the progression of their romance, and their familial and social context. Both characters are virgins, and while Edward is ardent and eager, Florence is frightened and repulsed by the idea that she will be physically (and perhaps emotionally) penetrated. It all goes horribly wrong, and sadly, both Florence and Edward have a specific insecurity which means they cannot breach a failure or misunderstanding that could have just been fleeting.
I read this book when it was first published, about a decade ago, and I remember being touched and moved by it. I read it again after seeing the new film version - directed by Dominic Cooke and starring Saoirse Roman as Florence and Billy Howle as Edward. The film is very faithful to the book, although Ian McEwan (who adapted his own book into a screenplay) chose to add some details about what happens to the characters after their brief marriage. Edward, especially in the film, comes across as the more tragic character. His injured pride, and a moment of boyish, brutish anger, leads to a loss that only becomes obvious with the passage of time.
The aspect I most admire about this book is McEwan’s careful specificity about the characters - particularly the details about their families, their career aspirations and the nuanced understanding of the class gradations which were still so important in mid-century England. It’s a small tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless. ...more
I’ve known about this book for years, but for some reason I kept putting off reading it. Perhaps I knew, instinctively, how much it would take out of I’ve known about this book for years, but for some reason I kept putting off reading it. Perhaps I knew, instinctively, how much it would take out of me; perhaps I was just waiting for the right time. Would I have always found this book to be almost unbearably moving? Perhaps. I only know that it has given me the most intensely emotional reading experience that I have had in a long while.
It’s a ‘book of a life’: a life in some ways uneventful, but full of quiet ‘desperation’ (Thoreau’s words) and small tragedy. Stoner is William Stoner: the only child of poor farmers, he is sent to university to earn a degree in agriculture so that he can help his father improve their small farm. In one of the few rebellious acts of his life, Stoner changes his course of study to English literature, and then he stays - for the rest of his life - at the university. He marries a woman who he barely knows or understands; they have one child; he falls in love, just once; he has a longstanding vendetta (not of his choice or making) with a fellow professor; and he teaches, year in and year out, for 40 years, until the somewhat precipitous end of his life. Stoner has a life which can be summed up in a tidy paragraph, but what this book does so beautifully, so profoundly, is give the reader the sense of what emotional depths some people (all people?) hide behind quiet, often undemonstrative, exteriors. Except when he is teaching, Stoner is an emotionally inarticulate person, and yet what John Williams conveys - in the most elegiac and elegant language - is a depth of passion:
”He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look, I am alive.”...more
It’s interesting to reread a book that I know well, but from the vantage point of having at least two decades of marriage under my belt. Unlike those It’s interesting to reread a book that I know well, but from the vantage point of having at least two decades of marriage under my belt. Unlike those other great 19th century romance/tragedies - I’m thinking Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina - Edith Wharton’s ‘Old New York’ love triangle is a pretty tepid affair. The protagonist Newland Archer may think of risking everything (well, honour and reputation) for love, but in the end he backs off (or rather isn’t required) to make that sacrifice. I’m pretty sure the longings of Newland for Countess Olenska used to seem more romantic to me; in reality, their ‘love affair’ doesn’t really add up to much. It’s as if they are both great projection screens: and while Newland projects safety, security and moral probity to Countess Olenska, she seems to represent the sophistication (both emotional and aesthetic) and greater sensitivity of Europe for him. Their love affair, such as it is, is really based on just a few meetings - and most of them are concerned with the question about whether or not Countess Olenska (Ellen) should return to her licentious Polish husband. Romance wants us to believe in ‘love at first sight’ and physical chemistry, but these two are not much more than representations for the other.
Newland, described as a ‘dilettante’, sees himself as a secret rebel; an objective observer of the more absurd rites of what would later be known as ‘The First Four Hundred’ of Old New York. At the beginning of the novel he is almost smug about his choice of bride: the unimpeachable May Welland. But after meeting Ellen, he begins to doubt whether the perfectly behaved May is the right wife for him after all. He has a dim sense that her perfect innocence and amiability are a form of cunning, even if she is not entirely aware of any duplicitiousness. But emotional honesty is not at all the thing in their world, and Newland feels isolated in his (ambivalent) desire that it be otherwise.
We never know much about May Welland, because Newland never knows much about her. Is there anything to know under her well-mannered serene surface? There is a rather chilling statement at the beginning of the novel about May’s seeming ‘frankness and innocence’. “But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of fictitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”
Newland Archer is a confusing character, because on one hand we are asked to sympathise with him and feel for his emotional sacrifices - but on the other hand, the world is ordered for his comfort, even if it does occasionally bind and restrain him. In the end, he prefers his fantasies to reality - and that is simultaneously poignant and maddening to me.
As his oldest son observes about his parents’ marriage: ”You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!”
It’s all very elegantly constructed, but just like the world Wharton portrays - this is more a story of form than feeling....more
Mother’s Milk, the fourth of five Patrick Melrose novels, opens with a graphic description of the birth of Patrick’s first child: “Why had they pretenMother’s Milk, the fourth of five Patrick Melrose novels, opens with a graphic description of the birth of Patrick’s first child: “Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born?”
What a brilliant, brilliant novel about the complicated relationship between mothers and their children. Author Maggie O’Farrell describes the Melrose novels as being ‘at once epic and intimate’, and I think this one best covers that range. It’s specifically about the toxic and perpetually disappointed relationship that Patrick has with his own mother Eleanor, but it’s also about the legacy of parenting - and how we are helpless, in a sense, to do anything other than respond to our own models. So Patrick is married to the fiercely, obsessively maternal Mary - whose all-consuming devotion to her two sons feels like another form of abandonment to her husband. Mary is responding to her own mother Kettle, who was both selfish and absent as a mother. And Patrick’s love for his mother’s French home Saint Lazaire - repository of childhood memories, and assumed inheritance - becomes another source of maternal treachery when Eleanor decides to gift it to a ‘Transpersonal Foundation’ and thus disinherit her son. Much of the novel is spent on Patrick’s emotional tenterhooks: he is desperate for his demented, paralysed mother to die, but she cannot even release Patrick (or herself) from the bonds of life. The novel makes a very neat life cycle, but in the end it’s an arrested one: just like Patrick’s emotional state. And the mother’s milk? Bitterness, gall, betrayal - and in this novel, the copious amounts of alcohol which have become Patrick’s latest destructive coping mechanism.
This is one of the funniest of the Melrose novels, but the humour is often painful. Still, Patrick’s two clever and articulate sons do add some comic relief. As ever, I was bowled over by the author’s stylish, intelligent writing - even when he is probing his psychological wounds.
“Mary was such a devoted mother because she knew what it felt like not to have one. Patrick also knew what it felt like, and as a former beneficiary of Mary’s maternal overdrive, he sometimes had to remind himself that he wasn’t an infant anymore, to argue that there were real children in the house, not yet horror-trained; he sometimes had to give himself a good talking-to. Nevertheless, he waited in vain for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness. He felt like a man who dreads leaving harbour, knowing that under the deck of his impressive yacht there is only a dirty little twin-stroke engine: fearing and wanting, fearing and wanting.”...more
'Inside a great novel, or poem, or play,' he told Xan, 'there is no time, only a place of joy where readers may meet and embrace each other. To share 'Inside a great novel, or poem, or play,' he told Xan, 'there is no time, only a place of joy where readers may meet and embrace each other. To share a love of reading is to share the best love of all, because there is no democracy of taste, there is one of feeling.'
One sign of how engaged I am with a novel is how quickly I read it - and I read this one (415 pages) in two days. Another sign is how many quotations I write down as I am reading - and for this book, I have pages of them. It was definitely the right book for me at the right time.
When I do read a contemporary novel, I appreciate that interplay between what's going on in the world (in this case, post-Brexit England) and how the novel's themes resonate with what's happening in my own life. I'm a huge admirer of Amanda Craig's writing, and I remember being similarly bowled over by her previous novel, Hearts and Minds, which is also set in London. Craig is a sympathetic observer of many strata of society; unlike Dickens, she is not overly sentimental, but she is a highly moral writer. She is equally aware of both the 'haves' and the 'have nots' of the world she describes. One of her main characters, Lottie - a mother, an architect and an unhappy wife - says at one point: 'I like people with a moral compass'. And I agree with her. I also like books with a moral compass; perhaps that's why I so enjoy 19th century novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope. (On his deathbed, the character of Hugh wants to have The Small House of Allington read to him. It's a book that I've recently enjoyed reading and for some reason that little detail delighted me.) Craig writes complicated, nuanced characters, but she never glorifies (or glories in) what is mean and ugly in human nature. For instance, Hugh (poet and father to Quentin) voices the opening quotation; he's so sensitive on one hand, and yet he has also been a selfish philanderer who has damaged his wife and children.
The primary storyline concerns Lottie and Quentin and the breakdown of their marriage. Quentin is a journalist and Lottie is an unemployed architect, and job losses and the general financial squeeze means that their only economic asset is their London house. In the short-term, the estranged couple and their three children - the oldest, Xan, being Lottie's son from a youthful one-night stand - are forced into renting their London house and moving to a ridiculously cheap house in Devon. One of the themes of the novel is city vs countryside. While London's citizens are described as house-rich (if they are so lucky to be home-owners) and time-poor, the Devon lifestyle affords different pleasures and restrictions. Various secondary characters add to the richness of the plot: Quentin's father Hugh and his mother Naomi have an important storyline, as does Lottie's mother Marta. For middle-aged readers, sandwiched as they are between the needs of their children and their parents, this aspect of the plot will definitely resonate.
There is the strong sense of how parents, and their own decisions and behaviour, affect and shape their children. A rich musician, 'Gore Tore', is a local Devon boy made good, but his indiscriminate womanising has left a trail of pain that impacts both past and present. Another important character is Sally, a health visitor, who is married to a local farmer and longing for a child of her own. Sally has one of those professions which allow her insight into the secrets of people's lives, no matter what their economic or social status, and she ends up being the bridge between various characters in the Devon community.
There is also a murder mystery 'buried' in the plot, and I had mixed feelings about this. I don't know if the novel really needed it, but I suspect that it might make the story more 'readable' or interesting for a larger group of readers. What interested me about it was the idea of inheritance: there is definitely a theme of 'the sins of the fathers' which runs through the novel. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Craig wants to make it clear that Quentin is in no way modelled on her own husband. Craig's husband may be a paragon among men, but I couldn't help but notice that men are often the source of frustration, pain and betrayal in this novel.
'Men fail us, Sally thinks, because they mostly won't or can't communicate.'
'However, among men it's as if incuriosity is a badge of honour, with the result that they all go stumbling blindly around in a fog of unknowing.'
' . . . it's just that his love lacks the crucial ingredient of imaginative sympathy.'...more
This novel is a marvel of compression and elegant writing. After finishing it, I realised that the events unspool over a mere 24 hour period and yet tThis novel is a marvel of compression and elegant writing. After finishing it, I realised that the events unspool over a mere 24 hour period and yet the author manages to create an entire world.
The cast of characters is small: 5 year old Patrick and his unhappily married parents David and Eleanor; their neighbours in France, Anne and Victor; and houseguest Nicholas and his girlfriend Bridget. The French couple who serve David and Eleanor Melrose are just glimpsed at the fringes. The story is set in a beautiful home in France, which is filled with the priceless acquisitions from noble homes all over Europe. The people in the house are unhappy, idle, and seem to live an entirely pointless existence - enlivened only by dinners with their 'friends' and the various hurts they can inflict upon each other. In this contest of will and malice, David reigns supreme.
'Eleanor had been brought up in a string of houses where every object seemed to have been owned by a king or emperor. The houses were wonderful, but guests left them with relief, conscious that they were not quite good enough, in the duchess's eyes, for the chairs on which they had sat.'
Although the book is about family dysfunction, class and money and snobbery are key to understanding this particular family. David comes from an old distinguished English family, but he has been disinherited by his father. 'It was never clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was so distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, but David left her in no doubt that they did.' Later, we learn that Eleanor's family fortune comes from the American matriarchal branch - and some ancestor who made a mint in dry cleaning fluid. It's like an updated 'Buccaneer' story of English breeding and title marrying an American fortune. The novel is certainly a lesson in that old maxim that 'money doesn't buy happiness', but it does serve to make misery more stylish. The quality of the wine is certainly better.
There are some hideous moments of emotional brutality in this book, but St. Aubyn makes them bearable with his detached narration and his dark sense of humour. Of David and Eleanor's marriage: 'He had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.'
The novel gives almost equal time to the various characters, but the inchoate personality and consciousness of Patrick haunts the novel. There are various struggles for dominance taking place throughout the novel, but none more potent and damaging than the one between David and his young son.
The character of Victor is a philosopher, and various philosophical discussions vie with gossip and cruel put-downs to make up the dialogue. At one point, Anne (the young American partner of Victor) and Victor engage in a conversation about the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula. Anne notes that Caligula's life story demonstrates 'how nearly inevitable it is for those who have been terrified to become terrifying, once they have the opportunity'. Not only does this truism sum up the novel, but one feels it will reverberate throughout Patrick's life.
The title of this book comes from Thoreau's famous dictum that the 'mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', and it is referenced in a fractious The title of this book comes from Thoreau's famous dictum that the 'mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', and it is referenced in a fractious exchange between married couple Otto and Sophie and Otto's absent law partner, Charlie - who is the silent, but still important, voice in the conversation.
Otto and Sophie have all of the trappings of middle-class success: the books, the car, the vacation home, the boat, the beautifully set dinner table. But still, the ugliness of life insists on intruding and making itself felt: whether it is the ugly landscape of Queens (so 'mean and shabby' that the 'tidy tombstones' seem to 'offer a more humane future'), the poor and drunken people who leave their trash and bodily fluids on their Brooklyn sidewalk, or the bite of a (possibly rabid?) cat. The reader is catching them in a moment where the 'centre cannot hold' (to borrow from Yeats). Their neighbourhood is changing, the country is changing and Otto's law partnership is splitting apart. I had the sense that they were a post-war 1950s couple who were completely ill-equipped for the social changes of the 60s, and just becoming aware of that fact. Sophie is a translator who doesn't seem to translate any more. It's just one of the details which could be read symbolically; another is the fact that the couple have not had children, and are now realising that they probably never will. Is the author suggesting that their existence has a certain sterility to it? The reader never knows for sure. The tone of the narration stays balanced on the knife-edge of sympathy and cold-eyed judgement, not quite satire, but you feel the edge of it.
Jonathan Franzen writes the excellent introduction to this book, and one of his insights - which really struck me - is that 'the fear of pain is more destructive than pain itself'. Throughout the book, Sophie tentatively explores her various pains - her unsuccessful affair, which seems to still haunt her; the cat's bite on her hand - but she shies away from exorcising them or dealing with them conclusively. Neither Otto nor Sophie is happy with the status quo, but they seem to fear losing even that. It's an interesting book - definitely a period piece in some ways, but still quite powerful. ...more
I feel very fortunate to have read My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible as close companions, one right after the other. The tight focus of I feel very fortunate to have read My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible as close companions, one right after the other. The tight focus of Lucy and her mother (in Lucy Barton) is widened in the story cycle of this follow-up book. Many of the same themes are here - the complexities and compromises of marriage, the flawed love of the mother/daughter relationship, the ripples of damage caused by war and poverty - but explored from different angles and points-of-view. Strout has a real gift for dialogue and the telling detail; these lives all seem desperately real. I also felt that they were particularly and peculiarly American. (I would like to discuss this point with book friends from other countries.)
When you read, do you often wish that you could get the back story on some of the minor characters? Well, this is what Anything is Possible does. Many of the characters that are mentioned in the conversations between Lucy and her mother get their own stories in this book. They range from family members - like Lucy's brother Pete, and her cousin Abel - to other members of the community of Amgash, Illinois. I suspect that many people will find this book a bit bleak, even if they admire the writing, but there is no doubt in my mind that Strout has great emotional insight....more
This is a slight book - elliptical in tone, structure and plot line. Despite its brevity, though, it has the emotional impact of a punch to the stomacThis is a slight book - elliptical in tone, structure and plot line. Despite its brevity, though, it has the emotional impact of a punch to the stomach. I found it a very discomfiting read, even as I admired the author's close observations and undeniable way with words.
The narrator is Neve -mid-30s, a writer - who is married to the much older Edwyn. Edwyn has already suffered from a mild heart attack and he struggles with pain, particularly in his hands; at one point, the narrator mentions that this pain will later be diagnosed as fibromyalgia. Physical and emotional pain go hand and hand in this book. The storyline dips in and out of Neve's past, sometimes alighting on other brief, dysfunctional relationships with men, but more often revealing moments with her divorced parents. Neve's father is portrayed as a 'greedy child, a tyrant child' who terrorises his wife and two children with his sudden rages and 'capricious rule'. He eats himself to death, walling himself up inside a shabby house filled with luxurious food. His rants are mysognistic, but more frightening because of the occasional sharp jabs of intelligence - or perhaps just cunning. His ex-wife is placating, alternating between a kind of dumb-show of being a submissive wife and passive-aggressive resistance. Finally, she just runs away - and then repeats the whole dynamic with another tyrranical husband. The astonishing thing about this book is how much Riley conveys with so little plot and virtually no 'explanation'. Gradually, the reader begins to realise how much the narrator's marriage resembles the dynamic of her parents' marriage - that first example of 'love' at work.
And yet the narrator is not unaware of her own emotional processes or behaviours. At one point, she makes a list for herself: guidelines for thinking and behaving. "This is your time and your energy. Don't try and 'manage' him. Be natural and let him be natural. That's what love it. No more cramped feelings on either side." She does realise how much energy she expends trying to 'manage' Edwyn - trying to keep him distracted and preoccupied, trying to keep him from entering the vortex of unreasonable anger. Their relationship - their arguments - really are like a lopsided ellipsis that circles round and round.
This ill-assorted pair are alike in one way: they share a loneliness that will sometimes be eased by moments of closeness. In a way, those moments of intimacy and affection are just as disturbing as their more typical dynamic of emotional bullying followed by an alternation of cowering, defiant and reasonable response. You will, of course, conclude that Riley describes an unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship; but the unsettling thing is that I couldn't help but feel that she had captured some pretty unpalatable truths, and I wonder how many readers will recognise something of themselves, of their own relationships, in her excorciating portrait of a marriage.
I saw Gwendoline Riley speak and read from this book at an evening to celebrate this year's Bailey's Prize short-list. There was an interesting discussion about her forensic eye, about her willingness to look closely and carefully at ugly things and then to describe them. I certainly found that to be true in this book. ...more
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