→ July 17, 2019
→ By

G.

John Berger’s G. won two of the biggest literary honors in the Commonwealth after its 1972 release, taking home the James Black Tait Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize; at the ceremony for the latter, Berger tore into the sponsoring company, Booker-McConnall, for exploitative practices, then gave half the prize money to the British Black Panther movement. G. was just the fifth winner of the Booker Prize and was considered “experimental” for its time, just as Berger, an outspoken Marxist, was seen as a sort of curiosity. Perhaps this book was revolutionary in its time, but nearly a half-centiury it feels dated and irrelevant, more notable for the author’s prurient obsession with women’s genitalia than for anything that happens in the book itself.

G. is the book’s protagonist, set on a dissolute course from childhood – he’s the illegitimate son of an Italian philanderer who made his money in canned fruit, but was raised by a mother who refused to let his father have anything to do with the boy – and growing into a heartless, wanton libertine who seduces women just to have them, even for a single tryst, with no regard to what happens to them afterwards. His escapades culminate in the simultaneous pursuit of two women in Trieste on the eve of World War I; he inveigles a Slovene servant girl into coming to a major, upper-class ball as his date promising her his fake Italian passport in return, so that he can also jilt the wife of a major local official, a move that, unbeknownst to him, marks him as an Austrian agent (which he’s not).

The novel was sold as a picaresque, which it certainly isn’t. If anything, it’s a thinly veiled commentary on the class structures of western societies that existed prior to the first World War and, with some obvious changes in who’s in the upper echelon, persists today. It is a scene from the class struggle, told about an idiot who was born into privilege and keeps failing upward until the war finally stops him. It’s also wildly out of date: We still have class distinctions, but where once a person was born into a class, now the distinctions are more of income inequality, or race, or their intersection. The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts are gone, replaced by other families, but their names lack the power of the earlier leading families; it is their money that speaks, and their money that explains the different treatment they get at every step in their lives.

Berger comes off as a Marxist, for sure, but he comes off even more as a pervert. The book is replete with descriptions of genitalia, primarily women’s, but in a gynecological way, not an erotic or even pornographic one. It’s as if Berger was obsessed with and disgusted by a woman’s sex at the same time, so he describes the vulva and vagina in the basest way to try to diminish the women themselves. Indeed, the women G. pursues here are mere props in the story; G. doesn’t care about them and Berger doesn’t give the reader any reason to care either.

I’d enjoyed a bunch of more recent Booker winners, which led me to decide to read most or all of the previous winners, but some of the pre-2000 titles just aren’t that good. I bailed on James Kelman’s How late it was, how late before I reached the quarter mark, as its stream of consciousness prose was maddening, the main character hadn’t moved more than about half a block in all that I read, and the heavy use of the c-word was really grating. I read but never reviewed Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, about an author of romance novels who has fled some embarrassment in England and takes a room at a seaside hotel in Switzerland where she meets the usual cast of eccentrics and learns things about herself. It’s a trifle, not as funny as it would like to be and nothing you haven’t seen before (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont covers similar ground, and better). I’m not sure who was picking Booker winners before this century but I’m at least glad they’ve upped their standards.

Next up: Like a moth to a flame, I’m reading another Booker winner, this time Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.

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→ June 18, 2019
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Magpie Murders.

Anthony Horowitz created one of my favorite television series of all time, the magnificent British mystery show Foyle’s War, which stands well on its own but also comes across as a loving homage to the golden age of mysteries, with its gentleman detective D.C.S. Foyle and solutions drawn as much from psychology as from unearthing clues. He’s also been tabbed by the estates of Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming to write novels using those authors’ signature characters, including the Sherlock Holmes novel Moriarty, which I found a quick read but unfaithful in style to the Conan Doyle novels and too reliant on a huge twist for its resolution. He’s also written three standalone novels of original characters, of which Magpie Murders is one, and it’s every bit as brisk and compelling … but this time, the twists work incredibly well, and the reader is rewarded with two different mysteries to solve.

Magpie Murders presents us with a Poirot-like detective, the Holocaust survivor Atticus Pünd, who has both the little Belgian’s dispassionate approach to solving murders and endearing arrogance, drawn against his first instincts into a pair of murders in a small English town full of eccentric but well-defined characters. Pünd is also dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and this is almost certain to be his last case, but this seems to motivate him further to solve it rather than dwell on his imminent death. The murders are linked more by place than by method or motive, adding to the complexity, and as is typical of mysteries of the era Horowitz evokes, everyone had a reason to want the latter victim dead.

The novel runs over 400 pages, which is quite long for the genre (in my experience, only Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels reached that length), but that’s because there’s a second mystery wrapped up in the first one, and I won’t spoil it here. The first narrative breaks right before Pünd appears ready to reveal the solution, and you’re plunged into a totally different story, written in a more modern tone and involving a new set of characters, one where it isn’t even clear that a murder has taken place. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, yes, there was a murder, because otherwise why would Horowitz even engage in this bit of metafiction?) The gambit here is that the end of the Pünd novel is missing, and the new narrator has to find the absent chapters to solve the mystery, which leads to a discovery of a murder and a conclusion that is more conventional for mysteries set in the last few decades. The marvel here is that Horowitz has nested two distinct, connected stories told in two entirely different voices, each mirroring a particular style of mystery novels – one from the golden era, one more contemporary – without ever ripping the reader out of the spell of the entire enterprise.

The twin payoffs here – I guessed the identity of the murderer in the inner story, but not in the Pünd one – help justify the book’s length, and Horowitz, who has eschewed the idea that this is an homage to Agatha Christie (even though her real-life grandson, Mathew Pritchard, appears as a character in the inner story), does capture the essence of the grande dame’s prose and structure. Unlike Moriarty, where the gimmick relied on fooling the reader from the beginning, the twist here is unforced and gives the reader a fair chance to follow what’s happening. As a Poirot fan (over Miss Marple), I was particularly pleased to follow Pünd, who is very much a Poirot surrogate in the novel, although he lacks the flourishes of the fastidious man’s mustache or ze little grey cells. Perhaps Horowitz is better when creating his own characters, even those which clearly draw from the icons of the genre, than when trying to work with the icons themselves.

Next up: Still reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

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→ April 3, 2019
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Childhood’s End.

My daughter has five ‘cycles’ in her English & Language Arts class this year, with a choice of four books in each cycle, usually tied together by a common theme in their subjects. We got the list last August, and I was pleased to see Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a book many of you had recommended but which I’d never read, on the list for her final cycle, coming up next month. I’d previously read three of his novels – 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, and The Fountains of Paradise, the latter two of them Hugo winners – but never this one, which I think many readers consider his strongest work.

It is … fine, I guess. It’s got an interesting conceit, certainly asks you to open your mind to some giant philosophical questions, and is heavy on the science. Like his two Hugo-winning novels, however, it’s written in such a detached way that there are no interesting characters and thus no compelling individual storylines. You read because you want to see how Clarke wraps up the big picture, but in my case, I never felt any emotional connection to anything or anyone in the book itself, not even when the entire human race is threatened with extinction.

Earth is visited in Childhood’s End by a highly advanced extraterrestrial race known only as the Overlords, who appear over Earth’s major cities, make contact via voice, and proceed to tidy things up for humanity, putting an end to war, famine, and disease around the world, acting as benevolent dictators with just a brief show of force to make their power clear. Their intent, however, is far less so, and under this Pax Overlordia human progress slows, both in the sciences, where the Overlords put a stop to all research into space exploration, and in the arts, where prosperity and lack of want quell the urge to create. One human manages to sneak aboard an Overlord ship bound back for their home planet, after a ‘séance’ that reveals the star system in question, but while he’s gone the true purpose of the Overlords’ visit and de facto occupation of Earth becomes apparent.

Clarke was something of a futurist, and major themes associated with that school appear in each of the book’s three connected yet clearly discrete sections, which function as novellas bound by setting rather than a single narrative whole. He was a staunch atheist who opposed both organized religion and the tenets of religious faith, incorporating the death of religiosity into this novel as he did in Fountains of Paradise. With the question of gods thus dispensed, he asks readers to consider what other meaning humanity might find in a universe without intrinsic purpose, using that as a loose segue to a middle section where he dances around the question of art – why we create it, and whether our urge to do so is a byproduct of the lives we live, ones with agony and ecstasy, with doubt and uncertainty. It’s a wonderful question, but Clarke abandons it before getting far enough to even create an interesting discussion within the novel itself, focusing instead on the closest thing the novel has to an overarching theme, which ties into the resolution of the main story.

I think after reading four novels I have a good sense of my own opinion of Clarke. He was absolutely brilliant, and able to bring complex ideas into his writing without making it inaccessible to most readers, but he had little to no interest in character development, and his prose was parched. This is the sort of novel I loved when I was a kid, because I could get caught up in the setting and the science. I enjoyed genre fiction at the time for its genre, and cared less about the quality of the fiction. I can’t read that way any more, and Childhood’s End struck me as childish, not in the quality of Clarke’s content, but in its aims. I ask more of a novel of ideas than Clarke is able to deliver.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Bill Lascher’s Eve of a Hundred Nights, the true story of his grandparents’ courtship and work as journalists in the Far East in the years before and during World War II.

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→ February 12, 2019
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The Finkler Question.

I have no idea why Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize; it’s not just unworthy of the honor, but it’s an aggressively bad novel, hard to read (despite some strong turns of phrase), full of unlikeable characters, and populated with bad stereotypes of Jewish people and, worse, Jewishness as a whole. It is a blurry facsimile of a Philip Roth novel; it is to Portnoy’s Complaint what the new Greta Van Fleet album is to Led Zeppelin IV.

The novel revolves around three men – Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler, and Libor Sevcik – who socialize from time to time in London. Finkler and Libor are both Jews, and both somewhat recently widowed. Treslove and Finkler were schoolmates, and Sevcik was their teacher at one point. Treslove is a Gentile, and not a widower but unable to maintain a relationship, with two sons by women who’d already left him before they found out they were pregnant. And for some reason, Treslove becomes obsessed with Jewishness – not Judaism the religion, but the Jewish culture, identity, and experience. He does so just as Finkler becomes involved with a group he renames the ASHamed Jews, anti-Zionists who express their disdain for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and seems to be renouncing some of his Jewish heritage.

Treslove begins referring to all Jews as Finklers, which … seems problematic. It’s unclear if Jacobson meant this synecdoche as some sort of clever gimmick, but it comes off as a kind of bad stereotype, as if Finkler himself is representative of all modern Jews. Jacobson himself is Jewish and has spoken out against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, especially that within Jermey Corbyn’s Labour Party, so it seems wrong to ascribe a malicious motive to Jacobson here, but the device does not work in the least – it is both grating and problematic.

And I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one who thinks this – in looking for a Guardian review of the novel from when it came out in 2010, I found this editorial that expresses my feelings on how the book uses Jewish identity as a sort of running punch line to no purpose. It feels dehumanizing on the page, which makes the book a worse read both for its inherent unpleasantness and because the characters become so much less interesting.

The story itself is also just not compelling at all, with Rothian obsessions with sex and genitalia, including a bizarre passage about an older circumcised Jew trying to create a new, faux foreskin for himself. (Don’t ask. Really, just don’t ask.) Finkler was serially unfaithful to his wife, who cheated on Finkler with Treslove. Treslove himself probably can’t maintain a relationship because he can hardly distinguish between sex and intimacy. He does meet his match, which is bizarrely foreordained by a fortuneteller at the start of the novel in a plot element that just drops off the page once the prophecy is partly fulfilled, and manages to screw that up too, in large part because he becomes obsessed with her Jewishness and can’t see her as anything but Jewishness incarnate. Treslove and Finkler are both insufferable in different ways, with Finkler a bit worse for me because I have met a couple of people of whom he reminded me, but must we quibble over degrees or flavors of insufferability? You can’t anchor a novel with two nitwits like them and then expect the reader to connect with what’s happening on the page.

Yet it won the Man Booker Prize in what looks like it might have been a weak year of candidates; I had only heard of one book on the shortlist, Emma Donoghue’s Room (the basis for the movie starring Brie Larson), and one other author, Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice already. I don’t know what the judges saw in this but I think it’s just plain dreadful, even if you give it a few points for Jacobson’s intelligent yet stolid prose.

Next up: Reading an out-of-print Graham Greene short story collection, after which I’ll read Philip K. Dick’s Our Friends from Frolix 8.

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→ January 17, 2019
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Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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→ December 26, 2018
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Amsterdam.

I’ve never met the novelist Ian McEwan, but after reading two of his books and seeing a film adaptation of a third, I think his worldview is depressingly misanthropic. Amsterdam, a slim novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 1998, plays out like a dark comedy without the comic elements, taking a mutual euthanasia pact between two friends and using it as a core plot device with the most obvious possible ending.

Clive and Vernon connect at the funeral of Molly Lane, a woman with whom they’d both previously had affairs and who has just died of some sort of progressive neurological disease, where they form this pact, saying if either sees the other heading for the same sort of miserable, undignified death, they’ll speed the process by going to Amsterdam where such things had just become legal. While at the funeral they also run into another of Molly’s former lovers, the ambitious politician Julian Garmony, then British Foreign Secretary with eyes on the top prize.

Vernon, an editor of a newspaper coping with falling readership, ends up privy to compromising photographs of Julian that could ruin the latter’s career, and after much debate within the office decides to publish them – over moral objections from Clive. Meanwhile, Clive, a renowned composer working on a piece for the government celebration of the upcoming millennium, is experiencing a bit of writer’s block and goes on a long walk in northwest England’s hilly Lake District, where he comes upon a man fighting with a woman, but chooses not to intervene because doing so might cost him the melody he’s crafting in his head. When he later explains this to Vernon, the latter is incensed at Clive’s selfishness and points out just how serious the consequences might have been. These two subplots turn the friends into mortal enemies, and, between that and the book’s title, you can probably see where we’re headed.

The Guardian‘s review at the time says the book has “a distinct whiff of Evelyn Waugh” in both style and subject, but I’d say that’s half right. Waugh’s social satires were often bitingly funny, both in character and in plot. If this reminds one of any of Waugh’s novels, it’s the questionably unfunny A Handful of Dust, where one major character ends up with one of the most unfortunate endings (short of death) in literary history. Amsterdam is devoid of humor; McEwan scorns his characters, and appears to loathe the Netherlands’ lax policy on euthanasia, but the combination of the two means two people we are supposed to hate drive each other to a shared ignominious end. Aside from my reaction that the conclusion probably wasn’t realistic, I was barely moved to shrug my shoulders. Even Tony Last got more of a rise out of me than that.

I didn’t care for Atonement, where McEwan builds a narrative around what I felt was a totally unrealistic event and then pulls the entire rug out from under readers; I did like this year’s film adaptation of On Chesil Beach, but the worldview within is still decidedly pessimistic, with both works arguing, in essence, that we can’t atone for or even recover from past mistakes. Maybe that’s true but it makes for miserable reading.

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→ December 12, 2018
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Last Orders.

Graham Swift won the Man Booker Prize in 1996 for his novel Last Orders, a book influenced by William Faulkner’s seriocomic classic As I Lay Dying* but rather more somber and fleshed-out in its telling of four men traveling to scatter the ashes of one of their friends. It’s a very quick-moving read where Swift gave each character, including the dead man’s widow and some of the wives and daughters of the men narrating the book, nuance and depth in a short period of time, but falls short on the ultimate question of what Swift is trying to express in the work.

* Whether it was more than just influenced by Faulkner’s novel is a matter of some debate. I don’t recall As I Lay Dying with enough detail to offer an opinion here.

Jack Dodds is the dead man at the heart of the story, a butcher, married to Amy, with a biological daughter June and adopted son Vince, and his death of stomach cancer sets off the events of the novel, including his last wish to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. Amy doesn’t wish to do this, so his friends Ray, Lenny, and Vic join Vince on a road trip to the coast, a journey narrated in parts by the four men, with other chapters telling portions of their history from the viewpoints of Amy and Vince’s wife Mandy. The present-day narrative unveils cracks in the relationships between the four men and between some of them and Jack from before he died, as well as emotional visits with him in the hospital after it was clear he wasn’t going to recover, while other chapters, including those narrated by Amy, unfurl Jack’s complicated home life and relationships with family members. Amy’s pregnancy was unplanned, and June was born with some severe developmental disability that has confined her to an institution; Jack refused to even visit her, while Amy dutifully visited weekly, and that started a crack between them from which the marriage could never recover.

Where Faulkner’s take on a caravan moving the coffin of the family’s dead grandmother bordered on farce, Swift uses Jack’s death to explore the different relationships between these characters, especially how Jack’s life choices – going back to his decision to become a butcher – affected those around him, permanently damaging any chance of a functional marriage to Amy. Mandy appears in the history as a runaway teen whom Jack decides to take in as an employee and boarder, a strange and perhaps inappropriate decision that also looks like an attempt to replace the ‘normal’ daughter he never had, only to have his adopted son end up marrying the girl who was a sort of surrogate daughter. Amy had an affair that Jack probably didn’t know about, with one of his friends, and her own story – that of a wife who felt emotionally abandoned because her husband washed his hands of his own daughter – is the most emotionally engaging part of the novel, including the question of whether she would rekindle the affair now that Jack has died. I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but it appears from what I read on my Internet that Amy’s character, played by Helen Mirren, gets a more significant arc in the script.

What misses the mark in Swift’s telling is the boys-being-boys aspect of the road trip. He accurately depicts the modern masculine idea of restraining one’s emotions, of swallowing your grief until you choke on it, but there are scenes here where the men are just acting like children – the juvenile fight, the bizarre behavior in a bar somewhere on the road – that don’t get at any ultimate point. This is a larger story set on the framework of a road novel, but a road novel has to have a metaphorical destination as well as a physical one, and Last Orders skimps on the former.

Next up: I’ll be reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings for a while.

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→ November 30, 2018
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Swing Time.

I didn’t love Zadie Smith’s White Teeth when I first read it, but after reflecting on it, I think it’s because it was so unlike anything I’d read before, and over time it continued to grow on me to the point that I included it the last time I ranked my top 100 novels. I read her third novel, On Beauty, but it looks like I never reviewed it; it was a good read, fast-moving, with well-drawn characters and intelligent themes, but it lacked the power of her debut.

Swing Time is her latest novel, coming out at the tail end of 2016, and covers familiar ground – issues of race, class, gender, and nationality in a global world that would like to tell you that it’s post-racial but is anything but. It bears more of the hyperbolic, frenetic nature of her debut novel – especially compared to the sedate On Beauty x – but there’s a new distance between the reader and the two main characters, the narrator and her friend Tracey, two girls of mixed-race parentage who are joined in childhood by a love of dance and separated by a gulf of class between them.

The narrator, never named in the novel, comes from a higher status than Tracey, in part because Tracey’s father is absent for reasons that are explained during the novel – explained, then revised for accuracy, which is also a huge part of the book. The girls love to watch old musicals, especially those of Fred Astaire*, and try to mimic his dance routines, later adapting those of pop singers they see on TV. Through a couple of coincidences, the narrator ends up a personal assistant to one of those singers, Aimee, some sort of teenage icon who has managed to maintain her following into her 30s, and follows the singer around the world while putting much of her own life on hold for the all-consuming job. Aimee eventually decides to build a girls’ school in The Gambia (never named, but identified as a narrow country, split by a river, ruled by a homophobic dictator, surrounded by Senegal, so there aren’t a lot of choices here), dragging her retinue to the country multiple times, falling in love with a local boy and eventually adopting a baby from the village. The narrator flashes back during this story to her childhood and then intermittent encounters with Tracey after they drifted apart, setting her timeline with Tracey, whose dance career never materializes and ends up in straitened circumstances, against the Africa/Aimee storyline with its absurd use of money and the westerners’ attempts to work with the villagers.

* Yep, somehow I read two straight books, this and Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, that featured the works of Astaire in a prominent role.

These encounters form a scenario where the distinctions of race, class, and national origin are even starker than what the narrator faced as a black woman in England, allowing Smith to rail against western paternalism and the corruption of African nations. (The dictator described in the book, Yahya Jammeh, lost an election a month after the novel’s publication and was forced from power about six weeks after that.) Nobody in the novel comes off that well; perhaps Fernando, a consultant working with Aimee on the school project who brings some needed cynicism to the circus, is the closest to a sympathetic character, but he’s never fleshed out to the extent that the narrator, Tracey, and Aimee are. Tracey is a sort of train wreck in the distance, facing the consequences of poor decisions, including those made by her parents, while the narrator sails into good fortune and eventually fritters some of it away through immaturity.

Swing Time read to me – and I say that recognizing I may miss much of its subtext – as a novel of big ideas that don’t gel on the page. For example, the narrator visits some tourist sites related to the slave trade, a practice that Smith seems to lampoon, but it’s so tangential to the story that it falls from the mind once the narrator returns to the frantic life of her job with Aimee. The singer herself is a mélange of various disposable pop stars and the second act of Madonna, who set up a nonprofit in Malawi that built a pediatric surgery there; she has since adopted four children from the sub-Saharan nation. Smith is satirizing the do-gooders of the west who would plow money into developing nations without considering whether their efforts are in fact doing good, but the depiction seems to argue that westerners, especially white ones, should stay home, when there are obvious examples of such charitable efforts succeeding as well as failing.

As for Tracey … I’m not sure I got where Smith was going with that character’s arc or her relation to the narrator. That the circumstances of our births, from race to socioeconomic status to the environment in which we’re raised, have enormous and perhaps irremediable effects on our lives is not a new thought, yet that seems to be Tracey’s main purpose in the novel. She was born with greater talent, but was unable to convert it, and much of the blame for that falls on her parents or the world as a whole. The narrator was born with less talent, but into better circumstances, and somehow fell into a successful career (albeit not in dance). The world isn’t fair, but again, Smith isn’t giving us any sense of how we might make it a little more so.

That’s not to say Swing Time is anything less than a good read – this is a smart novel with some thematic ambition, and even if the execution is imperfect, Smith is a glorious writer and even her lesser efforts force the reader to open his (my!) mind and confront uncomfortable issues. I suppose seventeen years on, it’s unfair to expect her to churn out White Teeth again, but I know that’s what I want her to do anyway.

Next up: Richard Flanagan’s A Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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→ November 22, 2018
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Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.)

Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. (I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.)

Mrs. Palfrey was the last of Taylor’s novels published during her lifetime, written when she was into her 50s, and perhaps a look forward at life in old age for a generation that was living longer and more likely to have many years after their children were grown. (She was married and had one child, but unfortunately Taylor died just four years after this book was published at age 63.) One common theme among the denizens of the Claremont is that they’ve largely been forgotten by people in their lives from outside of the Claremont: Adult children don’t show up often, if at all, nor are there many visits or even phone calls from the outside world. And when someone departs from the facility for what we might now call assisted living, the residents seem eager to forget her.

The intersection of her relationship with Ludo, which is somewhat maternal but with the awkwardness of a flirtation, and the way she tries to keep up appearances at the Claremont is the essence of the book’s humor – of course Desmond will show up, and hilarity will ensue. But Ludo also sees Mrs. Palfrey and her mates at the hotel as fodder for the novel he’s been long stymied in writing, a fact of which she’s ignorant, so the question arises for the reader if his affection for her is real or merely functional. The other residents of the Claremont are all stock characters skillfully deployed by Taylor for purposes of humor or pathos, both of a distinctly British variety – there’s little to make you laugh out loud, but much of the book is just witty, and it nicely balances out the obviously grim tone the book takes when one of its elderly characters dies.

This was Taylor’s most critically-acclaimed work, making the Man Booker Prize shortlist in its year, and appeared twice on top 100 lists in the Guardian – the one I use, and another that only included novels published in English (assembled by the same writer, twelve years apart). It’s a brisk, entertaining read, probably worth a more serious meditation on its thoughts on growing old and growing apart from the people who were close to us … but some topics are, perhaps, best left alone when one is in the throes of a good chuckle.

Next up: I’m many reviews behind at the moment, but I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders.

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→ September 24, 2018
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The Pursuit of Love.

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love appeared on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels of all time (they’ve since produced other lists, but that’s the one I’ve been working through), a very British comedy of manners that focuses more on drawing humor from situations than witty dialogue or more overt humor. The first book in a trilogy of stories starring Fanny as narrator, telling the readers the romantic escapades of her cousins, this one focusing on Linda, her closest friend and a woman driven to love for the wrong reasons until she eventually has one affair that looks like the real thing.

Fanny starts the novel with a lengthy prologue of sorts that sets up the strange family dynamic; she’s growing up with her Aunt Emily and spends much of her time at the home of her cousins and her peculiar Aunt Sadie and gruff Uncle Matthew, as her mother has a habit of leaving her husbands or beaux the moment things become a bit too serious, earning herself the family nickname “the Bolter” as a result. Fanny is more than happy to live with her cousins, however, as she ends up a boisterous household with close friends who join her in various silly adventures and form a secret club they nickname “the Hons” (which appears to be a play on the British way of referring to certain sons or daughters of lesser nobles, the Honourable, abbreviated “Hon.” in writing). Matthew plays the misanthrope but is rather a soft touch where his daughters and nieces are concerned, although he opposes giving the girls much of any education and thus leaves them naïve and unprepared for the larger world.

Linda is the focus of The Pursuit of Love, and pursue she does, grabbing the first suitor who gives her a second glance after her older sister, Louisa, finds a husband, as does Aunt Emily, who marries late (to the ridiculous health-obsessed, fad-chasing Davey, who later finds work as a staff writer for GOOP) and leaves Linda the oldest girl in the group without a mate. She marries poorly, however, as her husband Tony is a financier with little personality and who views a wife as a tool for career advancement rather than as a life partner. After bearing Tony a daughter, much to his parents’ disappointment, Linda, who has no interest in being a mother anyway, is told never to have another child or she may die giving birth, which further loosens her ties to Tony. She eventually absconds with the communist Christian (irony alert), joining him as an activist during the Spanish Civil War, where he largely ignores her for his political work and eventually has a fling with her friend Lavender Davis, which leads her by chance and misadventure to meeting the son of a French duke, Fabrice, who woos her with a charming self-confidence and rather a lot of money, producing what appears to be the one true love of Linda’s life.

There’s a tragicomic aspect to Linda’s entire story here, as she’s chasing something that might not even exist and makes a series of bad choices along the way, while also trying to lord her own romances over others who either don’t have partners or who’ve made more sensible if less exciting matches (of course, whether Christian is “exciting” depends on your point of view). She has a child’s view of love and marriage, and in some passages appears to treat it as some sort of competition with her siblings and cousins; by the time she connects with Fabrice, the Bolter has returned to Matthew’s castle and tries to make Linda her compatriot in serial romances, much to Linda’s great horror.

The Pursuit of Love is wry and sardonic throughout, but it’s not very funny, other than perhaps Mitford poking fun at the hypochondriac Davey, who is constantly changing what he can or can’t eat, often in absurd fashion (for example, making a weird distinction between “red” and “white” foods, but moving foods around to suit what he wants to eat, too). There’s a long tradition in British literature of satires of middle to upper class lives that combine parody with more traditional humor, but Mitford here sticks more to the former, apparently drawing on her own upbringing for some of her source material. The result is a fine novel with a compelling throughline around Linda’s lovelife, but one so light on humor I’d recommend a dozen or more similar books before getting to this one.

Next up: Arundhati Roy’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel The God of Small Things.

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