Falling in Love with Monsters & Other Surreal Tropes: Rachel Ingalls’s “Mrs. Caliban” & “Times Like These”

 In 1983, John Updike, the novelist and critic, introduced me to one of my favorite novels, Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban.  His review in The New Yorker was strangly inspiring and powerful.  I love reviews, but Updike’s reviews were exceptional, as though he were able to turn each narrative inside-out and explain its essence.


Mad housewives often inhabited the pages of literature in the late 20th century. Perhaps it had something to do with Second Wave feminism.  The heroine of Mrs. Caliban, Dorothy, is an unhappy housewife whose son has died and whose husband is mostly absent. She has begun to hear programs on the radio that couldn’t possibly exist.   In a cake mix commercial, a woman’s voice said, “Don’t worry, Dorothy, you’ll have another baby all right.”

Her husband Fred usually ignores her.  When he leaves after breakfast, he doesn’t say good-bye.

She stood by the door while he went out and down the front walk.  He didn’t look back.  And, of course, he hadn’t kissed her goodbye for years.  This was the same way that affair of his with the publicity girl had started:  staying lat at the office.  Maybe.  Or perhaps it was genuine, but she couldn’t tell anything about him any longer.

Later, while doing housework, she turns on the radio.  An announcer says that a dangerous giant lizard-like creature has escaped from the Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research.  She decides this announcement is not a hallucination, because it is not addressing her personally. And, indeed, when the monster shows up in her kitchen, and Dorothy falls in love with him, she knows it must be real.  She is determined to save him from the cruel scientists who have been keeping him prisoner. 

But is the monster real? If so, he is certainly preferable to Fred.  And we are completely on the side of Dorothy and the sea creature.

The woman-and-monster affair was a common trope in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. There were a slew of heroine falling in love with monsters or animals.  In Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets, a woman has sex with a dolphin;  in Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape, the wife of a zookeeper falls in love with Erasmus, an ape whom she has rescued from scientists’ research; and in Jane Gaskell’s feminist fantasy novel, The City, the heroine, Princess Cija, who has been abducted and raped by powerful soldiers, falls in love with an ape-man in the jungle. 
                     

 One can’t read about women and monsters all the time.  This week, I finally got around to reading more Rachel Ingalls:  her brilliant short story collection, Times Like These, which has been on my shelf for a while.  These remarkable stories are strange, unexpected, and sometimes Gothic. 
 

Ingalls is often interested in mad or mildly delusional people (like Dorothy in Mrs. Caliban). In “Last Act: The Madhouse,” William, who is besotted with opera, listens to his opera records after school. There are many madwomen.  He wittily observes,  


In quite a few of these operas, for instance, there was a mad scene. When a coloratura soprano was in the cast, you could be fairly sure that before the last act she’d be crazy, although still able to hit a high E.


William falls in love in high school, and gets his girlfriend Jean pregnant.  He gallantly promises he’ll marry her, but his upper-middle-class parents object.  And after Jean is spirited away by her parents, no one knows what happened to her. He hears later that she had attempted suicide and was put away somewhere.  Years later, he hires a detective to help him look for Jean.  They go from madhouse to madhouse, looking for someone who resembles his photo of Jean.  But one wonders by the end exactly who is mad, as William’s behavior spirals out of control.
                                

Ingalls never steps in the same river twice.  In the surreal story, “Somewhere Else,” a travel agent receives a letter saying he has  won a prize: a vacation.  Just as you might suspect, he and his wife, who also works at the travel agency,  are too busy ever to travel themselves. The  other winners are also travel agents who never have traveled.  The  destination proves to be surreal and spooky.

Unhappy marriages are common in Ingalls’s stories.  In “Correspondence,” Joan is the second wife of Max, a sexy war correspondent.  He is addicted to travel and danger, and carries certain lucky charms which he claims protect him in war scenes.  Women find him very attractive.  When Joan sees him flirting at a party, she remembers that this is how he started an affair with her, while he was married to his first wife.  She is tired of his macho correspondent routine.  She wonders, What would happen if he didn’t have his lucky charms?

Each of these strange short stories is bizarrely well-imagined, and each is different from the others.  Ingalls (1940-2019) was an American from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who moved to London in 1965.   Perhaps this dual-country point-of-view shaped her unique imagination. 

Booker Prize Shortlist 2022: I’ve Read Three!

Booker Prize 2022 Shortlist

So many holidays:  first Labor Day, then the announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist.  Yes, the latter should be a holiday.

I watched the Booker shortlist announcement live on Twitter, and then the feed got stuck.  I went to YouTube, and the same thing.  But eventually I was able to skip ahead and watch/hear the announcement – though not exactly in real time. 


I am very excited to announce that I have actually read three on the shortlist.  This is unprecedented.  And it makes me feel knowledgeable about contemporary literature, though in reality I read mostly the dead.

Here are the three I’ve read on the Booker shortlist.

:Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!   I think of Strout as a prose ballerina.  Here is the link to my review.

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker.  I was not surprised that Garner made the shortlist, and indeed I love his children’s books. I did not, however, get much out of his adult novel, Treacle Walker (here is a link to my review), but being a canny citizen of the world, I predicted he would make the shortlist, or perhaps even win, because he is a British “national treasure.” 

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.  Every word is pitch-perfect in this stunning novella. Here is a link to my review.

Here are the three I haven’t read.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory

Percival Everett’s The Trees

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida


On the shortlist we have one Zimbabwean writer (Bulawayo), two American writers (Strout and Everett), one Irish writer (Keegan), one Sri Lankan writer  (Karunatilaka), and one British writer (Garner). Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is not available in the U.S., but perhaps I’ll read Everett and Bulawyao.  I hope I have time!

Have you read any of these?  What is your reaction to the shortlist? I am always surprised that my personal favorites do not even make the longlist.  I loved Monica Ali’s Love Marriage and Charlotte Mendelson’s The Exhibitionist, but shockingly I was not invited to be a judge..

Loving “Middlemarch,” Charmed by Mildred Walker’s “The Southwest Corner,” & Intrigued by R. F. Kuang’s “Babel”

I was wearing pajama shorts, a CAT MOM t-shirt,  and tennies as I sat in front of the fan, ready to leap up and turn on the air conditioner if the temp hit 90.  When you’ve endured extreme weather – like biking for two hours when it’s 90 degrees, and then being chased on a trail by a horrible boys’ cross-country team who used my bike to pace them – yes, this really happened – you’re ready to spend the day in a comfortable, cool house.

The light looks like autumn:  slanting, softer.  Some believe fall starts after Labor Day, others that it begins September 22, the official date of the change of season.  But even temps in the 80s make me feel it is fall. 


Anyway, I have embarked on my fall reading program.  I am almost done with Middlemarch, and loving it.  Daniel Deronda is my favorite book by Eliot –  an elaborate novel partly about the consequences of a pretty, vain young woman’s marriage to a sadist – poor Gwendolyn marries him because he is rich and her family has lost all their money. It is also about attractive Daniel Deronda’s habit of saving women – first Gwendolyn, who confides in him when she is in trouble, and then Miriam, a Jewish singer whom he saves from suicide. It is also about Daniel’s exploration of Judaism after he discovers that he is Jewish. His view of the world and the people he had stereotyped slowly changes.   
                         

Middlemarch has never held much interest for me, but this time I am loving it, reading it as a Victorian soap opera. The inhabitants of Middlemarch, a provincial town, are shaped, changed, strengthened, or destroyed by misconceptions, gossip, lack of imagination, and money (or lack thereof).  Money is very important – the focus of much of the book.

Eliot’s prose is graceful and witty, and she does a superb job of developing the characters.  Indeed, there are so many characters that I intend to introduce you only to a few.  On my first reading, I did not find them particularly engaging.  I was interested only in Dorothea Brooke, a bright, willful young woman who makes the mistake at 20 of marrying a middle-aged scholar, the first intellectual she has met.  Everyone around her knows this is a mistake, but no one can stop her. Mr. Casaubon is an unattractive, absent-minded, neglectful husband and  indifferent scholar. Worse, as Dorothea’s sister Celia points out, is the existence of  two moles on his face, with hair growing out of them.  Celia’s observation exasperates Dorothea. Dorothea works so hard as her husband’s amanuensis that she even begins to study Latin and Greek.
 

The opposite of Dorothea is lazy, likable Fred Vincy, who failed his exams at Oxford and refuses to fulfill his father’s ambition for him of becoming a clergyman. He goes into debt, unworried because he expects to inherit the estate of his uncle, Mr. Pennyfeather.  Fred often visits his uncle, but mainly because he is in love with Mary Garth, Mr. Featherstone’s nurse and housekeeper.  Mary has taken this job because she hates teaching. Ironically, Mary is responsible for Fred’s not inheriting the estate:  Mr. Pennyfeather made two wills, and when he was dying asked Mary to burn one of them.  She refused, because she thought it would be immoral to tamper with his wills.  And thus the money does not go to Fred, which of course is good for Fred’s temperament, because now he will have to work.  And Mary will not marry a man who does not work.

Mary is my favorite of the three principal women characters in Middlemarch.  If only Eliot had spent more time with Mary!  I would have loved to know more of her history, of her growing up in a poor family where her strong-minded mother taught them while she baked and did housework.

The other woman character, Rosamund Vincy, Fred’s sister, is very pretty, and very shallow.  She sets out to fascinated Lydgate, the  handsome new doctor who cures Fred of typhus and studies science by night. And so when the two marry, he is astonished to learn her true, grasping, social-climbing character.  She miscarries after an accident on a horse, after he had asked her not to go riding, but she insists that she would have miscarried anyway.   And you can imagine what happens to Lydgate’s dreams of scientific discoveries, as he goes into debt to support Rosamund.

Will Ladislaw, who becomes the editor of a newspaper owned by Dorothea’s uncle, is the second cousin of Mr. Casaubon.  Will admires pretty, brilliant Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon refuses to admit him to the house, because he is jealous.

My favorite male character by far is Mr. Farebrother, a charming vicar whose only fault is playing whist in order to supplement his income:  he must support his mother, sister, and aunt. He is in love with Mary, and naturally her mother thinks he would be the best match for Mary – as do I – but love is blind.

Yes, I’ve only talked about the characters, not the structure or Eliot’s philosophy, but that’s where I’m living right now – with George Eliot’s characters, as I near the end of Middlemarch.
                   

FOR FANS OF GLADYS TABER.  I am a fan of Mildred Walker, the author of The Curlew’s Cry and Winter Wheat, both set in Montana. The author lived for long periods in Montana and Vermont, and all but two of her books are set in Montana.

I recently read her short novel, The Southwest Corner, set in Vermont, which reminds me of Gladys Taber’s books.  Both writers describe nature, the seasons, and living in the country. The Southwest Corner is the quiet story of Marcia Elder, a retired teacher who, at 83, realizes that she can no longer live alone in her farmhouse.

Walker’s writing is plain but engaging.  She writes,


It had been the longest winter Marcia Elder remembered in all her 83 years. So many days of waking up to frosted windows and unbroken snow across the field, and the front path even with the meadow.  Orville Greenstead came by every day or so, but he had tired of keeping the walk shoveled.

Marcia has never considered moving.  Then on a spring-like day, she  leaves the house to take a long walk and sits down and falls asleep.  When she wakes up it is snowing, and she is so cold that she can barely walk back to the house.  She is too exhausted to light the fire – it is difficult for her to carry the wood – and she falls asleep under a blanket, in a freezing house. 

And so she advertises for a housemate. The arrangement she makes with Bea, a bossy middle-aged woman, is awkward, and Marcia finds herself dominated by her . I loved this book mostly for Marcia’s observations of nature, and though I was anxious, I knew from the preface that all would turn out well in the end.
               

THE TROUBLE WITH INSTAGRAM. The photos of books are too pretty! Instagram inspired me to begin R. F. Kuang’s Babel, a fantasy set in an alternative Oxford.  A group of students, one Chinese, one Indian, and the other two girls, whose identities preclude them from being admitted to most Oxford colleges, attend Oxford’s  mysterious Institute of Languages.

I love the charming Author’s Note (really an essay) on Her Representations of Historical England, and of the University of Oxford in Particular.

She writes,


The trouble with writing an Oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford will criticize your text to determine if your representation of Oxford aligns with their own memories of the place.  Worse if you are an American writing about Oxford, for what do Americans know about anything?  I offer my defence here.


Kuang is a brilliant, imaginative writer – far above the standard of most fantasy novelists – but I read this at bedtime, so I may have to skim some parts.   There’s a hint of Brideshead Revisited here, crossed with Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House and Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines. It’s great fun, but 544 pages.

A Great End-of-Summer Read: Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “Medea and Her Children”

You might expect a Russian novel called Medea and Her Children to be dark and tinged with horror.  I assure you, it is not that Medea. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s heroine, Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, is the childless, widowed, beloved matriarch of a large Greek family in Russia.  She speaks passable Pontic Greek, which lags 1,000 years behind Modern Greek; she is the “last remaining pure-blooded Greek of a family settled since time immemorial on the Tauride coast, a land still mindful of its ties with ancient Greece.”


In this buoyant extended-family saga, Ultiskaya scrutinizes the complicated lives of dozens of characters.  (There is a family tree at the beginning of the book.)  Every spring and summer, Medea’s relatives gather at her small house in the Crimea.  They bring their problems with them, but they are soothed by the charm and simplicity of Medea’s house near the sea. 

In the spring, her nephew, Georgii, a geologist, is the first to arrive, accompanied by his son, Artyom.  Georgii heads for the wooden hut with the toilet, because it has the best view of the twin  mountains tapering down to the sea.  He also enjoys sitting in the chilly summer kitchen at night with Medea over a late dinner.  And there is something humorous about Medea’s insistence on small portions at meals:  if someone wants a second helping, she suggests they take a piece of bread. 


 Georgii would like to move to the Crimea, where he knows he would have a good life.  He has spent the last 10 years writing a dissertation he cannot finish, “and which sucked him into itself like an evil quagmire if he went anywhere near it.”  He wants to leave the city and start over: he becomes more and more determined as the summer progresses.

The doings of the Sinoply family fascinate two mousy summer visitors down the road, Nora and her daughter, Tanya.  Nora admires their courage greatly:  while she and Tanya are terrified of a poisonous snake, Georgii and his son pick it up and examine it with fascination.  Nora starts to come out of her shell after the Sinoplies invite her and Tanya to take a camping trip with them at the seaside.  There is always room for one or two more at Medea’s, and they are assimilated into the extended family. 


 Medea’s great-niece, Masha, is a stable wife and mother of a son these days, but she is fragile:  she attempted suicide as an unhappy child.  After her parents died in a car accident, she lived with her mad grandmother, who referred to Masha as their “murderer.” Fortunately, her great-aunt Alexandra took Masha in and raised her with her own children: Masha became especially close to Alexandra’s daughter, Nike.  

Encouraged by sexy, promiscuous Nike, a divorcee and relaxed mother of two, Masha initiates an affair with Butonov, a handsome sports doctor who is vacationing in the Crimea.  What she doesn’t know is that Nike and Butonov are also having a casual affair. Blithely ignorant, Masha writes poems and letters to Butonov, who groans when he receives them.  It never occurs to either Butonov or Nike what the consequences might be if Masha finds out about them. 


Medea herself has had her trials.  She was happily married to a dentist, Samuel, who she assumed was faithful to her.  After his death, she found letters about his affair with her sister, Alexandra, and learned that her niece, Nike, was Samuel’s child.  Medea sets out to confront Alexandra in Moscow, but only gets as far as Theodosia, where she visits her best friend Elena (also her sister-in-law).  She enjoys her conversations with Elena, and realizes a confrontation with Alexandra might end in a break between the  sisters. 


Medea and Her Children, translated from Russian by Arch Tait, is a  perfect book to read at the end of summer. Summer in the Crimea seems blissful! And we never before considered summer in the Crimea. This novel was nominated for the Russian Booker Award in 1997, and Ulitskays has won numerous literary prizes in Russia, Italy, Austria, France, and China, and was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2009.

What Is Your Favorite “Brand-Name” Publisher of Classics?

 

Do you have a favorite “brand-name” publisher of classics?

There are quantities of choices:  Penguin, Dover, and countless other companies publish their own line of classics.  Jane Austen must keep them from bankruptcy:  there cannot be much demand for Eiric the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas or Polybius’s The Rise of the Roman Empire.
                         

I do have a lot of Penguins.  On the bookcase in front of me are several black-cover Penguins, among them Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low (this is an older Penguin, with a yellow frame around the cover art), Natsume Soseki’s Botchan, Plato’s Republic, and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. I thought all the Penguin classics  had endnotes, until I checked the Japanese novels – these do not – nor does my 1970 copy of Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low. So perhaps the abundant notes are a recent phenomenon. 
                  

I am also fond of Oxford World Classics, which I consider to be in the same class as Penguins.  Most of my Oxfords were published this century, so all have an introduction, notes, and a chronology of the author’s life with the main historical events in another.  I have a few older used Oxfords (Trollopes) with yellow covers –  and I don’t believe those do have notes.  But they are all perfectly durable and readable, with notes or without.

Few classics publishers provide footnotes. That is the advantage of Penguins and Oxfords.  I am a huge fan of the Vintage classics, because I love the covers, but if you want notes, forget it. I do enjoy reading these pretty Vintage  paperbacks of Dickens and the Brontes, but some may be to-be-read once editions, because the paper quality varies.
                  

Modern Library paperbacks used to look dull, but they are sturdy and usually have good-sized print.  Lately they have spruced up the design.  And some of them do have notes!

Some of my used paperback classics are from defunct publishers. Were the old Everyman paperbacks published by Everyman’s Library? I also have some used ’80s Hogarth Press paperbacks of E. F. Benson (okay, not quite a classic) and a few obscure 19th-century writers.  

Are you a Penguin fan? Do you collect new or used paperbacks by certain publishers?  Do you choose one “brand” over another?

Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” & “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”

Claire Keegan’s stunning novella, Small Things Like These,  longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, is written in such spare, chiseled prose that there is an emotional disconnect.  The contrast between the subtle style and the hero’s emotions is chillingly effective.  The writing is gorgeous, yet restrained.

It is the Christmas season in Ireland in 1985. The middle-aged protagonist, Bill Furlong, a small-town merchant who delivers coal, turf, slack,  logs, and anthracite, is wondering what his life is for.  He contemplates heroism in a moment of weakness, or strength, depending on your point-of-view.  There will be consequences, because his depression and heroism are interlinked.  

Furlong is wretchedly unhappy. He and his wife struggle to take care of their large family.  His monotonous work routine supports their five daughters, two of whom are at an expensive Catholic school.  He worries about money, about his own misery, about the worn-out tires on his delivery truck. 


One early Sunday morning, he delivers wood to the convent, and finds a barefoot, half-frozen girl locked in the woodshed.  He marches her to the convent:  the girl says, “Won’t you ask them about my baby?” He talks to the nuns, who pretend to be concerned about the girl, not to have known where she was, and they send her to take a bath and cook her an enormous breakfast.  They also deliver a veiled warning to Furlong.   


The nuns are running a Magdalen laundry.  Furlong has heard stories, but never knew what to believe.  Now he identifies with the imprisoned girl because of his background: he was an illegitimate child, raised by his mother, a domestic worker who got pregnant when she was 16, and he didn’t end up in an orphanage or an institution, because Mrs. Wilson, his mother’s kind employer, let them stay. He grew up in Mrs. Wilson’ kitchen.  

And so he worries about the girl.  Both his wife and another woman warn him about the power of the church, and tell him he needs to forget what he has seen. 

This book is about his dilemma.  

I admired this novella very much.  It was only afterwards that I realized the voice was perhaps a little too restrained.  But this does not mean it isn’t a perfect book.  It is.


 My complaint:  it should have been longer.This is the third Booker-longlisted book I’ve read this summer.  My favorite is Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, and Keegan’s novella, which is perfect in another style, comes in second.  

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

This summer I keep thinking about the lyrics of Elvis Costello’s song, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.” 


 Because the summer has been spoiled by our next-door neighbors.  Not surprising – everybody has neighbors like that – but these are worse, because they’re Republican.  Years ago they posted a sign for a Republican candidate in our yard.  I marched over and told them to take it down immediately.  “We do not support that man or his beliefs.”

In the summer, we used to love sitting outside with a book. Not so much anymore, because the Repubs are noisy and have noisy guests.  Can you read while people in the pool are yelling, “Whe-e-w-w!” or swearing at the top of their lungs?  Just as you might suspect, the Repubs are trashy talkers. 


There is a constant stream of visitors.  We are curious about the two mysterious women who arrive every night at 11:30 and leave at 6 a.m.  I can’t imagine what they’re doing there.   Perhaps they are hookers, drug dealers… we’ll never know.

The most disruptive of their guests hold pool and hot tub parties .  The “guests” park on the street and traipse up the driveway into their back yard.  It occurred to us that the neighbors are probably renting out their pool and hot tub (perhaps via AirB&B).   

They are in violation of a city pool ordinance that decrees the gate to the fence around the pool must be shut and locked at all time. Their gate has been open and unlocked all summer.  Perhaps the inspector will come by sometime…


Now here’s a more normal complaint, though it is very upsetting:  they damaged (killed) some of our hostas when they power-washed their fence. The dirty water gushed through the slats.   But the Repubs claim our hostas, which we planted long before they moved here, are on their land.  (If so, why didn’t they fence it off with the rest of their yard?)

Next time they have a Repub fundraiser, I do think we should put up Democrat signs on their lawn.  We prefer to keep our political beliefs off our lawn.  It only makes for bad feeling.

Meanwhile, let me recite Elvis Costello’s (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding? 


Here are the lyrics.

As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself, is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
And each time I feel like this inside
There’s one thing I wanna know
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?
And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?
So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding? Oh
What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

Americans Will Need a Glossary: Alan Garner’s “Treacle Walker”

Even before I finished Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, which is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, I predicted that the critics would have called it a fable.  Any short experimental novel, and in this case fantastical as well, is referred to as a fable.  

Garner’s use of language in this odd little fable is sometimes perplexing.  Since I had no context for the oft-repeated words  “ragbone” and “donkey stone,” I thought Alan Garner, the brilliant children’s writer, was writing a post-apocalyptic fable.  “Is he thinking of Ridley Walker?”  I asked myself, because  Treacle Walker is the name of one of the main characters.

“Ragbone!  Ragbone!  Any rags!  Pots for rags!  Donkey stone!” This is the recurring cry of Treacle Walker as he drives his pony cart from place to place. I was repulsed by the idea of “ragbone,” until I looked it up online and learned that it refers to the British rag-and-bone man who travels in a cart and buys rags (discarded clothes) and bones (from which glue is made).  And a donkey stone – another word which flummoxed me – turns out to be a scouring stone.

This rather static book has a dream-like atmosphere.  The main character, Joe, a sickly boy with eye problems, lives alone in the chimney of his house.  Why alone and in the chimney I do not know.  (Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic novella after all, though it’s more likely some English fairy tale reference.)  Thrilled by the appearance of the rag-and-bone man, Joe trades an old pair of pajamas and “a lamb’s shoulder blade he had picked from a mole hill by the railway embankment”  for a pretty, almost empty jar the size of his hand, labelled “Poor Man’s Cream,” and a donkey stone.

Both items are magical:  the donkey stone rubbed on the steps keeps intruders out of the house, and the Poor Man’s Cream makes one of Joe’s eyes see what no one else can see:  it confers “glamourie” (the faery glamour).  Strange things happen.  Joe sees a bog man no one else can see.  And the characters in his comic books literally leap off the page and give chase through the mirror.  (I was afraid Joe would get stuck in the mirror.)

Garner’s prose is polished and spare, but let’s hope Treacle Walker comes with a glossary when it is published in the U.S.  As a lifetime Anglophile, I have finally been stumped by British English. The “craven nidget” turns out to be a “craven idiot.”  But what was I to make of the following?  “It was a hurlothrumbo of winter.  A lomperhomock of a night.  Nothing more.” Wikipedia says that Hurlothrumbo; or, The super-natural is an 18th-century English nonsense play by the dancing-master Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, published in 1729. . And I was unable to find “lomperhomock.”  

I would not be surprised if Treacle Walker won the Booker Prize, nor would I object, because I loved Garner’s children’s books.  But this novella seems a bit precious to me. 

Reading in a Heat Wave: Edith Wharton’s “The Mother’s Recompense” & Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”

Edith Wharton

Saturday was the last  hot day.  That’s what  the Weather Channel said.  You’d think we’d accomplish a lot indoors when it’s 100 degrees outdoors – finish writing that novel, learn to play the guitar – but in fact there is a lot of lolling around.

I did, however,  reread two short novels, Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense and Jane Austen’s  Persuasion.

I wonder if Edith Wharton is still in fashion.  I don’t see her mentioned much online. The last time I saw an essay on Wharton was in The New Yorker in 2012, by Jonathan Franzen, who is never adverse to being obnoxious.  He said that Edith Wharton wasn’t pretty.  He adds, “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”


I was exasperated by this non sequitur.  Actually, I think Wharton  is pretty enough, but what does it matter?  What do Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy have to do with it?  Would anyone have said of Henry James or James Joyce, “He isn’t pretty”? 


Before I go on to The Mother’s Recompense, let me say that my favorite Wharton heroine is Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.  Every time I reread it, I am indignant and distressed over her tragedy, as well as in awe of every elegant word Wharton wrote.  How can charming, intelligent Lily fall not just a few rungs, but right off the social ladder?  Lily is desperate: she believes she should marry a rich man to support her life-style, but bungles her chances because she doesn’t like the available bachelors.  The spell of drugs (laudanum) is her only relief as she falls into debt and deeper unhappiness.  Here’s what we learn from Edith Wharton:  No Prince Charming will save Lily Bart.  People like Lily – but not enough. The mystery of fiction is our identification with characters like Lily from Old New York.
                      

I’ve made my way through most of Wharton’s work, and last week I took The Mothers Recompense (1925) off the shelf, because a writer in one of those short interviews at The Guardian or The New York Times called it an underrated classic.

The fact that I had read The Mother’s Recompense, and didn’t remember it, might have been a portent that I would not rate it highly.  If I were a Roman augur, I would have watched some chickens or examined an animal’s entrails and then announced:  “This is not a good day to read The Mother’s Recompense.”

But even though it is far from Wharton’s best, I was riveted by this slight, tragic novel. Plot-wise, it is a page-turner. The 45-year-old American heroine, Kate Clephane, has lived on the Riviera for years, ever since she ran away from her rich husband in New York with another man from whom she soon parted.  Kate has survived in comfort, living in slightly shabby hotels, and dividing her days into periods of aimless social life, taking long drives with the elderly Mrs. Minty, dining with friends at the casino, attending a Ladies’ Guild meeting at the American church, and buying new hats.  And she often muses about her second lover, Chris, a much younger man who eventually left her, but who was the love of her life.

Kate considers herself permanently severed from her family.  And then her daughter, Anne, sends her a telegram, inviting Kate  to return to New York and live with her.  Kate’s mother-in law, the dragon lady who had forbidden Kate to visit Anne for the last 18 years, has died. 

Kate’s reunion with Anne is touching, and their relationship almost perfect, until Anne announces she is engaged to Chris.  This is a tragedy for Kate, who doesn’t know what  a mother should do in this situation. Should she tell Anne about her own relationship with Chris? Can she scare Chris away from Anne?  Either Kate or Anne will break. 

Wharton is usually a great stylist, but here we simply race through the book, not noticing that it’s less elegant than some of her best work.

A good read, not a great book.

As for Jane Austen’s Persuasion, is it not her best novel?  It is less complex than Emma and Mansfield Park, but it is stunning.

These days I read this as a sublime comedy about loneliness and the reinvention of self.  Anne Elliott has lost her bloom:  she is a lonely woman in her late twenties, who some years ago refused  Frederick Wentworth’s proposal of marriage, because her mentor, Lady Russell, said it would be unwise to marry a navy officer with uncertain prospects. Anne has never gotten over the disappointment; she still loves Frederick.  When chance brings Captain Wentworth and Anne together during her visit to her very funny, hypochondriac younger sister, Mary, the two try to avoid each other. But Anne blooms in the admiration of others, and reinvents herself, and there is, of course, romance.

Reading through Pain: Crime Fiction, a Booker-Longlisted Novel, & Humor

                  

The planet is so hot, it’s hard to imagine its getting hotter.   It was 100 degrees today, and it feels blazing, impossible.  
 
But in addition to suffering the heat, I’ve  been in a lot of pain this summer.  I  injured myself during a power yoga session.  Remember aerobic dance classes?  This was similar, only with yoga moves. I felt my ribcage rattling at one point.  For over a month, my ankles were swollen, and I could hardly bend my knees or  wrists.
 
I am now the queen of modified calisthenics:  leg stretches and gentle weight-lifting. Some days I managed to walk a mile (in pain), other days I could barely make it around the block.  One day I considered crawling home, but my knees weren’t bending properly.
 
I am almost 100 percent, but I couldn’t have gotten through it without Advil, calcium pills, gentle workouts, and some great books.
 
HERE ARE THREE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS.

CRIME FICTION:  The greatest American fiction being written today is crime fiction. (I’m not the first to say this.)  And Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawki series,  is the best American writer working today, says I.  
 
Her savvy, tough P.I. is V.I. Warshawski, a native Chicagoan and a cop’s daughter who became a lawyer and then opened her own P.I. office.  In Paretsky’s latest novel,  Overboard, V.I.’s  dogs run away from her on a walk along Lake Michigan and find an injured girl in a cave. The girl is taken to a hospital, and the case is turned over to the police, but it keeps coming back to haunt V.I.  The police thinks she’s holding out on them.  Really great writing, and if you know Chicago, or even if you don’t, her precise, deft prose will vividly recreate it.                       

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE:  I reread Elizabeth Strout’s stunning novel, Oh William!, longlisted for the Booker.  Her sentences are so graceful that they give a new meaning to the word “grace.”  Yet her characters have lived through a  lot of pain, and her lyrical sentences balance that in a way, not to make it palatable, but so that we can see their complexity more clearly.

Oh William! is a sequel to My Name Is Lucy Barton.  Lucy’s ex-husband William’s second wife and their daughter have left him, and he  invites Lucy to accompany him on a road trip to investigate his mother’s past.  He has just learned that before his mother left her first husband, a farmer, to marry William’s father, a German P.O.W., she had had a baby daughter. He never knew he had a sister. Can anything good come out of such a trip?  It’s not a Hallmark movie.   
Do read this because Lucy is good company.
             

 HUMOR WRITING:  I had read very few of P.G. Wodehouse‘s standalone novels, until I found a “Best of” list by Robert McCrum, one of Wodehouse’s biographers.  Piccadilly Jim is hilarious.   There are the usual imposters –  Jim, a practical joker  always in the society columns, changes his name so he can have a chance with a beautiful, bright American girl who scorns the antics of Piccadilly Jim. Imagine his surprise when he meets her family’s new butler – and it is his father, who has fled his wife in England because he couldn’t  bear to miss another baseball season.  I kept tipping back my head and laughing.  I don’t remember ever tipping my head before – that shows how funny Wodehouse is, I guess!

What to Read This Weekend: Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common Prayer”

When we talk about Joan Didion’s novels, we inevitably talk about Play It As It Lays. It seems that Play It As It Lays, published in 1970,  is the only one of her novels anyone has read.  Didion is primarily an essayist, so I understand the vagueness about her fiction. All I can say is, that if I have to spend another minute with the wispy, passive character Maria, I will scream – and I have spent hours with Maria, because people keep telling me Play It As It Lays is a masterpiece. Didion’s style is elegant and spare –  each word is resonant  of secrets in plain sight –  but  Play It As It Lays seems empty. 

Maria, the heroine, is one of those rich, purposeless, vapid women who never have to work and never make a decision without dithering.  The thing Maria likes best is driving very rapidly on the freeway, directionless and barefoot, so she doesn’t have to make a decision.  Couldn’t she become a chauffeur?  I mean, I would have liked to be an aimless, beautiful woman of whom nothing is expected, – but most of us have to work. 

I once attended a reading by Joan Didion, and was simply awed by meeting one of the best writers of the 20th century.  But I did notice, that in spite of her achievements, she seemed wispy and uncertain, a bit like  Maria. If I recall correctly, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, a novelist and screenwriter, sat protectively with her on the stage – or perhaps he simply stood very close and reassured her afterwards.   Didion’s career would suggest that she was strong and capable, able to talk to as well as observe her subjects. But then people are not what you think they are – are they?  It is easy to misinterpret.

I do love  her  third, more complex novel, A Book of Common Prayer (1977).  The principal character, Charlotte Douglas, is a flighty Maria-type, but I like Charlotte.  She is obscenely rich, but in a small Central American country she administers cholera inoculations, kills a chicken with her bare hands, bizarrely identifies different  types of assault weapons, and volunteers at a birth control clinic where she encourages the women to get diaphragms instead of IUDs (pointless, though, because there are no diaphragms).  

Charlotte is misunderstood,  so scattered, and yet so  competent.  One day she had impulsively flown to Boca Grande, a country in Central America on the brink of a coup. Charlotte knew nothing of the politics, but believes that she is only a tourist and thus will never be in any danger.  But then she doesn’t know that she on a “Persons of Interest” list, provided by the U.S. government.    Later, we find out why, though she never suspects.

The narrator,  Grace Strasser-Mendana, a retired anthropologist, an amateur student of biochemistry, is studying Charlotte.  “I will be her witness,” she says.  

Grace says of Charlotte:


She talked constantly.  She talked feverishly.  She talked as if Victor had released her from vows of silence by walking up to where she stood with Ardis Bradly and offering her a crab puff.   Every memory was “lyrical,” every denouement “hilarious,” and sometimes “ironic” as well. … She seemed to be receiving these pointless but bizarrely arresting stories out of some deep vacuum of nervous exhaustion, transmitting them dutifully in a voice soft and clear and oddly confidential. She used words as a seven-year-old would, as if she had heard them and liked their adult sound but had only the haziest idea of their meaning…


 

The men refer to Charlotte as  norteamericana, or norteamericana cunt. She talks to them so intimately,  jumping from one subject to the next, mentioning her family as though everyone knows them:  Warren (her first husband, a mean-spirited professor who wears out his welcome wherever they go),  her second husband, Leonard, a famous radical lawyer (“He runs guns,” she says shockingly at one point), and her daughter Marin, who they assume from her conversation is a child. But Marin is actually a member of a terrorist group, responsible for a bombing.

Charlotte has a tragic life.  In general, she doesn’t pay much attention to what others say:  she is focused on her own past.  It would seem she remembers only in flashes and small, soon-forgotten revelations.  Grace learns her history by a series of conversations with  Charlotte and Charlotte’s family:  eventually she even visits Marin, whom she recognizes from the stupid revolutionaries in her country.


I loved Charlotte. She is a tragicomic character – more tragic than comic, but no one really knows that about herself.  She has courage.  And we can’t really see quite what she knows, because occasionally she says something that implies real discernment.


And, of course, Joan Didion’s writing is superb.