We Had It So Good

Linda Grant writes like a dream. Not a bad Anita Shreve all will be punished dream, a wonderful I-can-dream-of –a-time-when-everything-I-read-will-be-this-good kind of dream. Grant is a wonderful guide through the hopes of youth verses the reality of adulthood. She has the most amazing ability to illuminate lives, to find what we all hold in those tiny corners we guard in just a few quick sentences. 

Grant’s most recent novel is We Had It So Good. This time the story is about a young couple who meet at Oxford in 1969, marry, have children and eventually face up to what they thought they would be and what they have become. Stephen is a Rhodes scholar from a working class, Jewish family in California suddenly in a world he is unprepared for culturally and competitively. Andrea is the daughter of absentee parents at Oxford to study psychiatry. When Stephen gets bounced from University they marry. For Andrea it’s a love match for Stephen it’s a way to avoid Vietnam and the draft.

Surprisingly the marriage takes. The squatterville section of London they settle in during the property is evil days of the sixties ends up being worth a couple million, Andrea becomes a successful psychotherapist and they have two independent, cynical and judgmental children, Max and Marianne. Stephen uses the times to play hippie, he uses his science degree to make LSD, uses his connections to become a BBC producer , his charm to bed other women and in general sits back emotionally letting life happen to him. As the couple reaches their fifties luck seems to finally abandon them.

In middle age Stephen and Andrea and most of their friends from college days have reached a comfortable abundance in their lives. The fires they planned to light when they were young have given way to living essentially the same lives, with the same desires, as their parents. Their children are dismissive of their parents’ achievements both past and present, retirement is looming and caring for their own aging parents (The generation that saved the free world and that has to rankle.)is on the doorstep.

These rebels of the sixties have made big changes happen socially and technologically but have they come anywhere near fulfilling the promise of their early days? Taking We Had It So Good in this direction, Grant could have easily made her novel a mocking condemnation of wasted opportunity populated with caricatures of former rebels. Instead she did what she does best. She takes ordinary characters with ordinary lives and brings them, their choices and their cultural experiences into focus with a steady unsentimental eye. We Had It So Good is not Grant's best novel but it is very, very good and I will gladly take close to the best from her verses the best from a thousand other authors.

The Hangman's Daughter

For the past six months or so I have been seeing a lot of positive reviews for the novel The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch and I was intrigued. I have been wanting to try something in Amazon's Crossing publishing program. These are translated titles that Amazon themselves publishes in the U.S. This novel is historical fiction set in Germany in 1659, it's chubby coming in at 431 pages and Amazon priced it right at roughly $6. It's right up my alley. How could I resist?

This historical mystery begins with the unexpected death of a child. The boy is found to have what appears to be a satanic symbol on his shoulder and immediate cries of witchcraft race through the village. Then come more missing/dead children, angry mobs, false arrests, interfering officials, a gang of orphans and hidden agendas. Stepping up to solve the crimes and save the old midwife accused of witchcraft are the local hangman/village healer/closet intellectual and the new physician in town who is in love (the forbidden kind) with the hangman's daughter.

If the contemporary dialog doesn't make you give up on the book entirely then the historical trappings of the novel are enough to hold a degree of interest for you. The lives of executioners is certainly an untapped area in historical fiction and Potzsch brings up many interesting details of their lives but without any insight into their characters the book is like reading a kiddie encyclopedia. Potzsch does not bring anything new to the other historical aspects of the novel or indeed to the plot. It's too bad. The world of the hangman could have supported a much better written and researched novel.

Well, two softball games  later I'm done with The Hangman's Daughter. It was...a snooze. Who knows if it was the writing or the translation or a combination of both but this book was turgid. There is a lot of racing through town, breaking down doors doors, near misses, mysterious deaths and general mayhem combined with a potentially exciting setting and premise so it's a little surprising to me that I was so bored through most of this novel but there you have it. Go figure. The real mystery here is the one where bad writing killed an inviting idea placed in an under used setting.

The Tortoise and the Hare

I had never heard of Elizabeth Jenkins although she is the author of 20+ books. That’s not so surprising I guess. She is a British author with only one title currently available in the U.S. However, when I did a little research I found that Jenkins was critically acclaimed and financially successful during her career. She was good friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Rebecca West. She was slighted by Virginia Woolf, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for her 1934 Harriet and passed away last September at 104 years old. All that should qualify her for a major rediscovery, right? A Masterpiece Theater series or at the very least an appreciative article in a major newspaper or magazine.

My girl Hilary Mantel was the means of my discovery of Elizabeth Jenkins. Ah Hilary. She always does me good. I had gone to my local for a copy of Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety to give to a friend. This is a new friend. The only reason I meet people these days is to have someone else to pass that novel along to. That book is one of my favorite novels of all time. It is a brilliant retelling of the French Revolution through the eyes of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins. Anyway, right there in the middle of Hilary’s shelf space between Wolf Hall (How nice would it be to read that again for the first time!) and Fludd (The scene where the spinster housekeeper is making herself a wedding band out of a sweets wrapper? Genius!) was a copy of The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins.

It was fate. My girl wrote the introduction to Tortoise. Her name was on the cover big as life along with the authors’ and a bookseller’s mistake became my delighted discovery. The understandable mis-shelving created a new author experience for me. So thank you confused bookseller.

The Tortoise and the Hare is a title with immediate meaning for any reader. We all know that story, slow but sure the tortoise wins the race. Elizabeth Jenkins does not rewrite this fable so much as she redefines it as a study of marriage. She also talented and smart enough to never let you feel comfortable in your choice of which character is the tortoise and which is the hare.

Your choices are Imogen and Blanche. Imogen is a young 37. She is an attractive, self-effacing, passive, show piece wife. A good hostess, always stylish and a lover of all the arts. Blanche is a moneyed country woman. She can hunt, solve problems, and build a dam with a piece of cheese and robin’s egg shell. She is short, stout with legs like a bull and is a settled 52 years old. The race to win, their competition, is Evelyn Gresham. Evelyn is a successful 50 year old barrister and Imogen’s husband . Imogen and Evelyn, though not unhappy, have a marriage based on her adoration and his condescending affection. Could Imogen possibly lose her husband to Margaret Rutherford’s twin?

Jenkins rounds out this unusual love triangle with a clear eyed look at neighbors, friends and the upper middle class country life of the period. With the exception of Blanche all of the other adults in the novel juxtapose the Gresham’s relationship in some way. For better and worse they are well drawn examples of the road not taken.

Thinking this might be a little chicklit-y? Think again, my friend. This is an intricate comedy of manners with ever more well defined characters encased in absolutely gorgeous writing. The kind of writing that makes you read sentences over and over again. I adored The Tortoise and the Hare and I cannot wait to read more Elizabeth Jenkins!

The Watery Part Of The World

In The Watery Part of the World, author Michael Parker has built his story around two historical facts. The first is that in 1813 Theodosia Burr Alston the daughter of Aaron Burr and the wife of the governor of South Carolina disappeared when the schooner she boarded in South Carolina failed to arrive in New York. The second fact is that in 1970 two elderly white woman and one African American man were the last townspeople to leave a small barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. These two events bookend a very interesting novel imagining the 150 year history of that small island.

Thanks to a doting  Father, Theo was probably one of the very best educated women in the United States. In 1813 she was headed to New York to fight the treason charges against her father when her ship seemingly vanished. In Parker's story, Theo's ship is attacked by pirates and she eventually winds up on Yaupon Island in the Outer Banks. Her rescue from the pirates and survival comes about as the result of help from a hermit and freed slave, Whaley. Theo's long term survival is aided by her mad belief that despite being trapped on the island she is still a vital part of her Father's defense. She cannot give in to death while she is still needed. All the other trappings of her former life rapidly fall away in the face of a life spent scavenging the beaches for anything edible or useful.

Sisters Maggie and Whaley and Woodrow, a man compelled to help them, came to be the last citizens on the island because of safety concerns. There have been too many floods, hurricanes, storms for people to be willing to live on Yaupon and for the mainland to support services on the island so in old age they become evacuees. Why they have stayed on the island is complicated. It goes beyond this place having been their home all their lives to history. Woodrow feels that he somehow owes it to his late wife to stay. His tie to the sisters is no Driving Miss Daisy. It is deep and dark. He is a direct decedent of the freed slave that saved Theodosia's life more than a century before. Maggie and Whaley are the last survivors of a doomed race, people that time forgot. They are the last descendants of Theo and of the island. Their lives have always been measured by the island. For them moving to the mainland might as well be moving to the moon.

Parker alternates the chapters between Theo's story and her decedents. Woodrow, Maggie, Whaley and the anthropologists who periodically visit to record their lives each have their own points of view represented. So while Theo's story has a straightforward authority coming only from herself, the parts of novel that deal with the more recent past have a more intricate jumble to them.

Despite the presence of pirates, pestilence and perversity The Watery Part of the World is not an action a minute read. Nor given the starting points for the novel is it reliable historical fiction that details a particular moment in time. Michael Parker has made his book a meditation about isolation, how habit can kidnap a life and the strange and powerful relationships that develop when choice is not an option. This is a beautifully written character study that is just shy of being a fantastic novel.

Butterfly's Child

Butterfly's Child is a first for me. It is a novel that continues an opera. The opera is Puccini's  Madama Butterfly and the novel is the What If story of her son. Most of us have absorbed the basic unhappy love story of Madama Butterfly through pop culture osmosis without ever having seen any production. In the early 20th century a beautiful Geisha named enters a marriage contract with an American navel officer, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. The Geisha falls deeply in love with her husband and he seems to love her as well. After he goes back to sea she bares him a child. Three years later Pinkerton returns to his faithful, longing wife with his new, American wife, Kate. Pinkerton is too cowardly to confront his Japanese wife and instead leaves his American bride to do that. Not willing to live a life disgraced by her husband's betrayal, the Geisha sends her son into the garden and kills herself.

Author Angela Davis-Gardner (whose book Plum Wine I recently read and enjoyed very much) begins her novel with three year old Benji leaving his home in Nagasaki to live on the family farm in Illinois with his father Frank and stepmother Kate. The plan is to tell the neighbors that blond haired, Asian featured Benji is a newly adopted orphan in need of conversion to Christianity. You don't need to have a Magic 8 Ball to know that this blended family is in for a world of trouble.

Benji does what is expected of him around the farm and at school but is ever the outsider. His parentage is a taboo subject at home but a favorite gossip topic in the community. He grows up dutiful and eager to please but with a burning desire to know more about his birthplace and real family. Daddy Frank is no farmer but he does get very good at drinking and remorse. Stepmother Kate has trouble loving her husband's love child and reconciling that resentment with her faith. When the truth about Benji's background comes out (Come on! That cannot be a spoiler.) his fragile family cannot take the strain. That and the reaction of the neighbors send him racing back to Japan in search of the truth about his Mother.

Davis-Gardner moves Butterfly's Child confidently between the complex culture of Japan and the seemingly open book life on an American farm with imagination and style. The characters that she has purloined and those she created slowly open up like a fan revealing their hearts and capturing our intense interest. She has replaced the opera's grandeur with an intricate layering of relationships and the lure of deeply held secrets. Davis-Gardner has taken a much treasured story and dared to enlarge it. Bravo.

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You

The Publisher of  My Dear I Wanted To Tell You describes the novel as, "a poignant testament to the power of enduring love". ~~sigh~~ That's the kind of vapid phrase that can make me put down a book immediately. I didn't though. The cover was too pretty and the description also had these tidbits: "Rose joins the nursing corps to work with a pioneering plastic surgeon treating wounded" and "necessarily imperfect rehabilitation".

"Necessarily Imperfect Rehabilitation". Those are not three words that I could ever have the imagination to string together. They sound so sadly Frankenstein-ish, so like an understated military evaluation of a crippling medical evaluation. Perfectly in keeping with a novel set during World War I like My Dear I Wanted To Tell You by Louisa Young.

In Young's novel the war to end all wars gets a masculine and feminine point of view. Three of the main characters are the girls they left behind: Julia, Rose and Nadine. Upper crust Julia spends the War trying to stay the exact same beautiful woman her husband married while spinster cousin Rose and young Nadine join the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). VAD was made up of mostly untrained middle class women who became hospital staff, cooks and ambulance drivers during the War. They served in Great Britain and at the front. Along with the independence and training VAD provided her, Rose finds a purpose for her life. Nadine's service gives her the opportunity to grow up exposed to a much wider world than she would ever have known if not for the War.

The characters that make up the masculine side of the novel are Peter and Riley. Peter is Julia's husband. He has turned to alcohol to get through the War and become a sullen caricature of the gentleman he was. Riley joins up in a rash romantic gesture and ends up in Peter's unit. Riley is an innocent from the wrong side of the tracks in love since childhood with the above his station Nadine. There is more than a touch of Atonement in their relationship.

The title, My Dear I Wanted To Tell You, is the greeting from real postcards used during the War. These postcards were handed out to wounded men as a way for them to help prepare their families for the brisk and brutal military notification of their injuries that would follow. One of the differences between WWI and the previous conflicts were the numbers of soldiers who survived. The most interesting part of the novel concerns the advancements in reconstructive and plastic surgery at the time. These pioneering medical treatments meant that more men were returning home with physical scars and loss of limb to test their survival on a whole new front.

Although My Dear I Wanted To Tell You is more romance that clear eyed study of war at home and on the front, Young does a good job conveying the horrors all five characters face. These are people completely unprepared for everything the War will bring them in contact with and Young's treatment of their successes and failures has a truth based in strong research. That is nothing new in the author's use of war to emphasize the social and scientific changes of the period but that does not diminish her compelling storytelling. For all the similarities to Atonement, Birdsong, Regeneration and Brideshead Revisited, My Dear I Wanted To Tell You is still an enjoyable read.

Seen That Disney Movie, Bridesmaids?

I saw the movie Bridesmaids last night. It was....underwhelming. There were a few very funny moments but there were many more long, drawn out trying to be funny moments. The first fifteen minutes can be avoided and the entire three hour long look-at-me-I'm-stoned-and-I-didn't-mean-to-be bit on the airplane that felt like no one actually wrote it (and I mean that in a painful way not a hey isn't improv great way) could have been jettisoned. Or maybe just made funny?.

 

But.

The reason I bring Bridesmaids up at all is the ending. After the predictably boring wedding finally happens the heroine goes off into the sunset with a man to have a happily ever after. I know the movie was about being in a wedding so it's not out of left field to have an ending that leads you to believe that another wedding will happen. Yea. I'm all for love but throughout the film the heroine's life has been a train wreck. This woman is jobless, career-less, broke, would be homeless except that she can move in with her Mother, self pitying, and willing to be unhappy in a bad relationship presumably just to have a relationship but the movie has a happy ending because the heroine is with a man at the end of the movie. So Bridesmaids is just like a Disney Princess cartoon except that the Princesses are a lot more likable and have great hair.

Jill Clayburgh was in Bridesmaids. It was nice to see her again and sad that we won't be seeing her again. Too bad that the woman who starred in one of the few movies about a woman choosing independence over couplehood, An Unmarried Woman, wound up in yet another movie that isn't as funny or honest as you thought it might be and that lets women everywhere know that everything will be fine if they have a man.