Every weekend we cogitate on taking a camping trip in a state park. We have a tent, though other camping gear must be replaced. For instance, my sleeping bag is an old-fashioned “mummy” bag, which I have never slept a wink in.
A friend and I once camped off-trail in a park where camping was forbidden. We were teenage renegades who mockingly called ourselves a “girls who dare,” but we could not figure out how to put up a tent. Two boys in our class, both Boy Scouts, did it for us. Then we walked around, fell in the creek, walked back to the tent, and dined on Ding Dongs.. We complained bitterly about having to pee in the woods. We got up early, after sleeping very little, and vowed never to go camping again.
Camping with my husband, another former Boy Scout, is more enjoyable, though I am not really the camping type. And so while we debate the pros and cons of the trip, we compile a“campable” reading list, i.e, books we can concentrate on outdoors.
So let me recommend a delightful comic novel, Mrs. Undine’s Living Room, by James Wilcox, published in 1987.
Mrs. Undine’s Living Room is the third book in Wilcox’s series of Tula Springs novels, and my personal favorite. Wilcox has been compared to Anne Tyler, and, indeed, Tula Springs, Louisiana, is as quirky as Tyler’s Baltimore.
This novel is so funny that I can hardly turn a page without laughing. One of the main characters is Olive Mackey, a bossy secretary at City Hall who spends little time at the office. In the beginning of the novel, she has left the office to check up on Uncle L.D., a 91-year-old man who lives in an apartment above Sonny Boy Bargain Store and prides himself on his perfect memory.
While Olive struggles to change his diaper, she reminds him not to pay Mrs. Undine, a volunteer who is scheduled to visit him. He has no intention of obeying Olive. “In my dull, retarded way, may I suggest that I am able may be able to make up my mind about paying Mrs. Undine?”
We cannot help but empathize with L.D., who is practically bedridden and wants to talk to someone more on his level than Olive. He also annoys Olive by refusing to wear the Lacoste shirts she has given him, and insisting on dressing up for Mrs. Undine in “his vest and the hundred-percent silk coat from Marshall Fields in Chicago, where he was from, or somewhere near there.”
Although Wilcox is so witty, and his characters are close to caricatures, he conveys their underlying loneliness. L.D. begs Mrs. Undine to stay and make him a grilled cheese, but she refuses – he didn’t eat the last one she made, and she is supposed to stay only 20 minutes.
Mrs. Undine is low-key but fascinating. A former civics teacher and now a Ladies’ Society volunteer, she also works as a substitute teacher at a fundamentalist Christian private school. She doesn’t believe in creationism, and doesn’t intend to go near evolution in her lessons, but is so grateful to be teaching again that she ignores the school’s peculiar philosophy.
And Mrs. Undine, though in her 60s, is surrounded by men who need her in one capacity or another. Martin Bates, her ex-son-in law, an incompetent dental student, lives with her (even she finds this odd) and is always in her way. She urges him to go out and meet women. “Would it have killed you to go to that social?”
Like most handsome men, Bates is used to women doing what he wants. He gets on his high horse when he hears Mrs. Undine will be teaching science, because of the creationism issue. He threatens to move out.
“Well, dear, if that’s the way you feel about it. I put your suitcase in the hall closet… And I believe there’s some of your underwear in the dryer.”
Never has a man so quickly backed down!
There is even a possible murder. Why did L.D.’s paid caregiver fall out of the window?
Yes, even the mystery is comical. I can’t wait to reread the other Tula Springs books.