The End of Book Award Season:  The Booker Lists As Guides

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Every year I rely on the Booker Prize longlist for recommendations of new books. I seldom read anything published after 1999, or if I do, that writer never publishes again, so I need a guide to contemporary fiction. Over the years I’ve read some stunning Booker winners and finalists, though my favorites seldom win. I mean, they never win! 

This year, I was pleased to see Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say and Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House on the longlist. I predicted Strout’s novel would be a shoo-in for the shortlist, and it was. The characters in a small town in Massachusetts are divided by American politics, and the protagonist, a popular history teacher with a strict no-phones policy, is so depressed by his quotidian life that he contemplates suicide. Strout is an elegant writer who is shortlisted for every prize again and again, and one wonders, when will they give her the prize?

When the Booker winner was announced last week, the vloggers and bloggers were astonished. Harrison’s science fiction book, The End of Everything, had been a long shot, I gather, and is viewed as a difficult post-apocalyptic novel. One vlogger said she could not understand it, but then neither could the characters, who are victims of an event they don’t understand. . I love SF, so I look forward to reading it, though I pray it’s not difficult in the sense of Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker, written, as I recall, in dialect. Paul, a much-loved, popular bookseller, recomended this so highly that I was hypnotized into buying it.

If you’re new to literary SF, I recommnd Dino Buzzati’s The Stronghold, Philip K. Dick’s novels, Jonathan Lethem’s early work, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s short stories..

And though wild horses couldn’t compel me to read Marlan James, I do want to read The Renovation, highly praised by a friend, and Black Bag.

I Am a Janeite

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I did not intend to become a Janeite.

I had read all of Austen’s books over and over, with the exception of Northanger Abbey, which was too light for me. But when we moved to a dark, gray-skied city where the sun shone only wanly and it snowed in May, I reread Northanger Abbey.

And then I attended a Jane Austen Society meeting.

It was a tiny meeting, unlike the huge Jane Austen Society conferences of today, which, as I understand it, are fueled by films based on her books. There were only eight or nine charming old-fashioned women at the society meeting, all of whom knew Jane by heart.

These kind old women served scones and tea, and then passed out xeroxed copies of a play of Pride and Prejudice.  I don’t remember what scene we read, but I was assigned multiple tiny parts.  In retrospect, I would have liked to read the role of Lydia or Mrs. Bennet, because both are flighty and ridiculous, and I like a good laugh.

Reading aloud the play was fun, even soothing. And after the meeting, the youngest Janeite (perhaps in her thirties or forties) chatted with me about how much she’d learned from these older women, who, as she said, “knew everything about Jane Austen.”

And that’s how I became a Janeite, though I didn’t hear the term Janeite till much later.

. FACTS ABOUT MY RELATIONSHIP WITH JANE

My three favorites of Jane’s books are, in no particular order, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma.

My favorite hero is Captain Wentworth of Persuasion.  He is the sexiest man in Austen’s books, and I love it that Anne got him back.  Good for her and him!

How Jane Austen’s views on persuasion are not dissimilar to Lady Russell’s. Jane Austen and Lady Russell both advised young women on the subject of marriage. In Persuasion, Lady Russell persuades Anne Elliot to turn down her suitor’s proposal, because he is poor and has no rank.

And Jane Austen, in real life, wrote a tactful letter to her niece Fanny to dissuade her from accepting the proposal of a young man, whom Jane liked very much but did not think was right for Fanny.

Jane writes tactfully:  “Your own feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point. – So far however as answering your question, I have no scruple. – I am perfectly convinced that supposing you were to marry now, would be sufficient for his happiness; – but when I think how very, very far it is from a Now, & take everything that may be, into consideration, I dare not say, ‘Determine to accept him.’ The risk is too great for you, unless your own Sentiments prompt it -“

My favorite Austen heroine is Anne Elliot in Persuasion.  She is sensible, tactful, pretty, and capable, but doomed to be an unloved daughter and spinster after she is monstrously persuaded by her mentor, Lady Russell, to reject her suitor Captain Wentworth because of his poverty and rank then.

Not all people think Lady Russell was monstrous: in fact, they feel that she was looking out for motherless Anne.  But Anne’s concession to Lady Russell led to eight unhappy years, until by chance she met Captain Wentworth again – and now, ironically, he is rich and a captain.

As a 21st-century reader I prefer the delicate style of Persuasion to the broader comedy of Pride and Prejudice, but I return to P&P because Lizzie Bennet is a modern woman, and, in a way, I struggle to understand Anne.

Almost Meeting John Updike and Other Famous Men

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Many people long to meet famous men and women. “Should I go on a grapefruit diet?” an acquaintance asked before her favorite writer came to town.

I thought not, but then I am immune to the charms of famous men. First, I have no conversation, unless the famous person wants to discuss the blue wave. Second, I am not the sort of woman who gallops down the hall by the side of John Updike as he approaches the stage. Yes, my acquaintance seductively jogged beside him, but he out-jogged her. Third, I wasn’t wearing the “little black dress” recommended for such occasions. And fourth, it is possible I didn’t wash my hair. I stuck a lot of barrettes in it so I would look as if I’d tried.

I love John Updike, and think he should have won the Nobel, since he was one of the most stunning American writers of the 20th century, but I am not an autograph hound, and after nodding at him – maybe curtseying – I simply ate my dinner at the trestle table with the other fans.

When I meet extreme fans of great men or women I think of what Colette said in the beginning of her autobiography, My Apprenticeships.

“I have never had much to do, in the course of my life, with men of the sort others call great. They have not sought me out.  For my part, I have shunned them, saddened to find them, for all their renown, already on the wane, already anxious to fit their niches, to live up to their reputations, a little strained, a little broken down, secretly begging for mercy and determined to ‘put over’ charm by exploiting their weaknesses, when not attempting to dazzle by a forced display of their declining light.”

Colette is brusque on the subject, and makes it clear that she prefers the company of quirky, unknown people. As for myself, I don’t think in terms of “great” or “famous,” because we live in a quiet town described by a friend as “a good night’s sleep.” If I made a list of the famous, it might be short, because I mostly read the dead. And I’ll never get the chance to meet Joel McCrea or Dodie Smith, so I’d better catch up on the contemporaries, no?

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Janeites:”  Reading Jane Austen in War

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If you’re a Janeite, you know who you are. If you live at my house, you go easy on the Jane binges. Once or twice a year, I reread one of Jane Austen’s novels. My dear husband does not like to see this.

“Haven’t you read that before?”  Well, even he has read Pride and Prejudice – once.

He is scandalized by dedicated Janeites, some of whom read nothing but Jane. Even I admit they get a LITTLE carried away, making Regency gowns and dancing the minuet (or whatever) at JASNA conferences.

I recently reread Rudyard Kipling’s short story, “The Janeites,” which is a true pleasure once you get past the dialect. A group of Masons, most World War I veterans, are chatting and reminiscing while polishing and cleaning their lodge.

And then Humberstall, who used to work in the mess hall with Macklin, “a toff,” during the war, tells the Masons about Macklin’s obsession with “this secret society woman I was telling you about – Jane.”

Humberstall wanted to join the Janeites, but the preparation was stiff. Macklin required him to read all six books first.

When asked by one of the Masons if Jane was real, he replies,

“Jane? Why, she was a little old maid ‘ood written half a dozen books about a hundred years ago. ‘Twasn’t as if there was anythin’ to ’em, either.  The weren’t adventurous, nor smutty, nor what you’d call even interestin’ – all about girls o’ seventeen (they began young then, I tell you), not certain ‘oom they’d like to marry; an’ their dances an’ card parties an’ picnics, an’ their young blokes going off to London on ‘orseback for ‘aircuts and shaves….”

Such a charming short story, but also very sad. War is hell, but Jane’s books comfort “the toffs”, and she survives this particular military unit because she has been passed down to the working-class survivor, Humberstall.

Is Anne Elliot on the Shelf? Down and Out in Spinsterdom

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In Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, we have a fairy tale structure. The heroine, Anne Elliot, once beautiful, smart, and in love, rejected the proposal of the man she loves. Eight years later, having been persuaded by family and friends not to marry Captain Wentworth, she is still on the shelf when he returns to England, successful and rich.

And being on the shelf is such a peculiar state for women in the English novel. Perhaps these women are not quite spinsters, but they ae very close to it. They help out at home, try to balance the family’s budget, have no prospects, and are stricken when they run into their ex-lovers in social situations. But it is clear that Anne Elliott would not be on the shelf if there were suitable men in the neighborhood. She is the perpetual aunt, but she could run a corporation. That’s how smart she is.

Spinsters in novels are sharp and intelligent.  Some eventually marry, some do not.  They don’t choose to be spinsters: somehow it just happens. Dickens’ novels teem with spinsters, Miss Havisham, a bitter, jilted woman in Great Expectations, and Miss Lucretia Tox in Dombey and Son, an aging woman, rather nice when you get to know her, and ever hopeful of marrying Mr. Dombey, who doesn’t notice her at all.

The novella that breaks my heart is Storm Jameson’s A Day off. A “kept woman” slightly past her expiration date is down and out in London, out of money, getting older, dumped by her latest, and she steals the purse of an old woman who sits down at her table in a tea room. This novella is very painful to read, because what are the options for her?  Will she return to being a shop girl, or is she too old for that?

There’s something magical about Persuasion. Anne is a kind of Cinderella, with her older sister and father (wrong sex, I know) ignoring her and in general treating her poorly. But she becomes a fairy tale princess, pursued by good and bad men, when her bloom returns to her, on a trip away from home, and the good man prevails. Of course, in Austen’s Persuasion, there is a marriage plot, so Anne will be spared the fate of Miss Tox or the unnamed narrator of A Day off.

Writing this, I realize how odd it is Austen, a spinster, a woman on the shelf, loves a love story so much. Love can save or destroy women’s lives in so many of Austen’s novels. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice elopes with Lydia, with no intention of marrying her, and Darcy comes to the rescue, because he is in love with Lizzie, Lydia’s sister. So love can save or destroy women: Austen is aware of that.

The Daily Jane Austen Delivery

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My husband brought in the mail and gave me a package, then said with a straight face, “This is your daily Jane Austen delivery.”

“How did you know? Which one is it then?”

You see, there is a Jane Austen deficit at my house so I had to order a new copy of Emma. I’m not quite a Janeite – I don’t belong to the Jane Austen Society – but I’ve loved her since my teens when I carried The Modern Library Complete Austen Novels everywhere one summer.

“Is it Emma?” he guessed.

A lovely Vintage classics edition

How many copies of Emma do you need? Two? Three? It depends on the condition, and how often you read it. (I’ve read it 10 times.) I have my Norton from college, but the paper is tan and fragile; I also have a well-read paperback with fabulous footnotes and an introduction; and a cheap flex-bound paperback I picked up at a used bookstore. (It’s not as nice as you might think, except for the flexible cover), So you could say I go through a lot of Emmas.

Another question:  how many copies of Pride and Prejudice do you need?  At the moment I only have one, and it struck me that it might fall apart at any moment. I had to order a new paperback to make up for the condition of the old orange Penguin I’ve depended on for years. (I’ve read it six times.)

And how many bodice ripper covers do you need? Well, Austen’s heroines are not the bodice-ripper type, but some of the old designs are funny. Take a look at this Emma.

Sometimes I donate old Jane Austen books to sales.  In fact, that’s why I have a deficit.  I gave away a circa-80s Oxford because there was a small tear in the cover. It was necessary to buy a new one.

Is there a virtual JASNA now? If there is, perhaps I could tune in to some of the talks and the papers read.

And if you want to know where the phrase Janeites came from, read Rudyard Kipling’s moving short story, “The Janeites.”

Are We Adorable? Sylvia and Me

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I am a fan of humor writing. I cackle over Cynthia Heimel’s hilarious columns (If You Can’t Live without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?), Gladys Taber’s comical autobiographical novel, Mrs. Daffodil, and Emily Kimbrough’s charming humor/travel book, Forty Plus and Fancy Free.

The cartoonist Nicole Hollander was another favorite of mine. While looking up her Sylvia cartoons online, I was saddened to learn that she died  last April.

Hollander began to write and draw the Sylvia cartoons in the 1970s.  In those days she published them in alternative publications, but from 1981-2012 the comic strip was nationally syndicated.

The cartoon character Sylvia smoked, drank, and talked to her cat.  She had wisecracks for every occasion.  In one cartoon, a man at a bar tells her, “Face it, Syl, you need us. Can you imagine a world without men?”  She replies, “No crime, and lots of happy fat women.”  (It’s funnier with the drawings.)

In another favorite, a cat sits on her head. She says, “Sometimes I enjoy writing with a cat sitting on my head, other times not so much.”

Among her collections of comics are I’m in Training to be Tall and Blonde (1979), The Whole Enchilada (1982), Tales from the Planet Sylvia (1990), and The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (2010),

I also enjoyed her comic memoir, Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial. She doesn’t mourn ageing: in fact, she thinks she is adorable in an outfit she wears to the movies. If this is denial, I want it too. Now that I am a woman of a certain age, I, too, have cute outfits to wear to the movies.

In an interview with NPR about Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial, she said, “Well, you know, I did, sort of, out of the corner of my eye notice that I was aging. And I had created a cartoon character who would age instead of me.”

Do I have a Sylvia alter-ego?  Well, yeah, I think so.  Of course Kat’s style is different. She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t go to the hair salon, but simply enjoys the ridiculousness of life, reads, and drinks tea.d. I can’t wait to go the movies so I can wear that cute sweater that may be a sweatshirt or a jacket: who can tell?

Trollope Online:   Do Online Book Groups Count Anymore?

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One of the highlights of the early 2000s was my membership in a Trollope book group on Yahoo.  I had read the better-known Trollopes, the Palliser series and the Barsetshire series, but had never come across his other novels.  Imagine my surprise to find he’d written at least 50 books, including a biography of Cicero.

Trollope was a disciplined writer who wrote fiction and translated Cicero for three hours every morning before work. (He was a civil servant at the post office, and invented the mailbox.) I am astonished by the consistency and quality of his prolific writing.  And I’m grateful for his inexhaustible inventiveness, because there are never enough Brontes and Austens to go around. Thank God for Trollope!

There are thousands of Trollope fans. Last year, at an online Trollope event, there was the fevered atmosphere of a comic book convention. Fans were ardent, and if there’d been merch, somebody would have made a fortune.  

And then I saw him. I thought, Wait a minute, is that irritable man Mr. Z? There was a guy named Mr. Z in online Trollope and Jane Austen groups who always made trouble. Well, it might not have been he, but he looked the way I thought he would:  unshaven, in a tweedy outfit, and was that a Renaissance Faire  t-shirt under his sports jacket?  

Things are different online these days with the development of vlogs, Facetime, and Zoom.  But  the early 2000s was a great time for written online discussions.  People didn’t write short messages, in pre Twitter/X days; they wrote thoughtful essays, often several paragraphs long.  And when Yahoo astonished us by canceling its groups, they started afresh on Ion and Goodreads.

But now we have moved on from the accessible Goodreads to the film-oriented Discord, which I found a nightmare. I joined a book group of intelligent people who met on Discord, or more like posted videos of themselves talking about books.

“Where do I write write my thoughts?” I asked.

No one knew. 

“What’s Discord?”

No one knew.

There may have been two or three written messages at the Discord book group, but it was mostly videos.

Although I tried to delete Discord from my screen – for some reason it had downloaded right from the browser into the middle of my computer screen – and it would not go away.  Put it in the trash: it comes right out.  Delete it repeatedly, it pays no attention. I gave this computer to my husband because I was so annoyed by its quirks. And he can’t get rid of Discord, either.  Somehow he has tamed and banished it to some kind of obscure hidey-hole, but it jumps out when he’s not looking.

So my advice is: Don’t discuss Trollope on Discord.  And if you find a nice writing venue for dedicated Trollope fans, let me know.

Cataloguing Mistakes:  Why Are the Humor Books in the Travel Section?

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If you are looking for the humor writer Emily Kimbrough’s Pleasure by the Busload, you will be surprised to find it in the travel section.

Kimbrough is best known for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, co-written by the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner. This comic memoir recounts the two Bryn Mawr roommates’ adventures on a trip to Europe.

Much as I love this book, I find their separate volumes of humor columns even more charming. Skinner and Kimbrough both pursued writing careers, and though Skinner has more fans, I prefer Kimbrough’s slightly more down-to-earth writing.

I am especially a fan of Kimbrough’s Forty Plus and Fancy-Free.  Before a trip to Italy, Emily and her friend Sophy enroll in an Italian course at the Berlitz School.  Sophy is fluent from the first day, rolling her r “like Caruso… on the stage of the Metropolitan,” while Kimbrough’s own delivery ” had been uncompromisingly Muncie, Indiana.”

To shelve Kimbrough’s books in the travel section seemed to be a catalogueing mistake.  But sure enough, Pleasure by the Busload, an amusing account of her trip to Portugal with the aforementioned Sophy and other friends, was next to a humorous travel book by the columnist Art Buchwald.

In Portugal, Sophy has rented a Volkswagen Microbus, which Emily mistakes for a delivery truck. No one had told her it would be as big as a trailer.  “… the step from ground to floorboard was a span well over three feet, not possible to accomplish in a tight skirt except by raising it to sufficiently to to allow one’s knees full play.  I was to learn this never failed to charm the Portuguese within eyesight to a rapt scrutiny of the procedure.”

The men are expert oglers both in Portugal and Italy. In Forty Plus and Fancy Free, there is ogling, whistling, and possibly pinching. The women call out that they are grandmothers, but this doesn’t stop them.

Very young grandmothers, I would say!

Dr. Literature:  Should We Diagnose Fictional Characters?

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Here’s a question for your doctor:  Should you diagnose fictional characters with imaginary illnesses?

CLUNK! 

You lay down your head.  Did you know that Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley had anorexia?  No, nobody did.  Sure, she is thin, but a fellow reader diagnosed her with an eating disorder because she was “languishing.”

“Maybe she just needed a day in bed,” someone else in the group said wisely.

I mean, I’m languishing, too. I flip through my books listlessly, because I only want to read the Brontes.  I don’t ever want to read anyone else again. And there are only seven published novels by the Brontes:  four by Charlotte, one by Emily, and two by Anne – hardly enough to last a month and a half.

Oh, yes.  Let me pass on that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is a veritable mental hospital.  Lo and behold! Ups, downs, love, betrayal, tantrums, nervous breakdowns, vengeance, hanging a dog from a tree, depression, bipolar – I can’t keep up with the diagnoses.  Fascinating, but can you believe I used to think this was a romantic novel?  I miss those days.

“Catherine and Heathcliff are bipolar for sure,” a psychologist said authoritatively.

Finally!  A doctor! Can she cure them?

But please, take away our other friend’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Everything with her is a gynecological illness that could be cured if you did your own pelvic exam.

I love Esther Summerson in Dickens’ Bleak House, an  angelic woman who is kind, helps the poor, makes her friends laugh, and gently gives good advice in such a way that it seems to be their own idea.

But alas! I am human, not a darling fictional character.  The angels are all in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and The Bishop’s Wife.  In Wings of Desire, an angel falls in love with a trapeze artis, and tumbles down to Earth to be human with her. In The Bishop’s Wife, Cary Grant the angel is here on Earth to help the bishop, but he falls in love with Loretta Young, the lovely bishop’s wife. Cary is charming and takes Loretta Young skating, and still she doesn’t fall in love with him. Poor Cary!

I LOOK angelic these days. I am sure of it.  If the light is dim – I am the soul of angelic beauty. I And yet I don’t get assigned to work in Heaven with Cary Grant,  who by now surely is an angel and could be my mentor. 

I can only be an angel at book group.