1990s

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

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Fresh off reading The Snow Queen, I went to my Cs shelf to see what else was waiting by Michael Cunningham. Well done for stockpiling, past Simon – I had a couple to choose from, and opted for Flesh and Blood (1995). It’s 466 pages long, and if you’re familiar with my reading prejudices, you’ll know that I tend to be a bit scared of a long novel. But I decided to trust Cunningham on this, and I’m really glad I did. What a novel.

Flesh and Blood follows three generations of the same family, from 1935 to the far future, though the bulk of the novel takes place between the 1950s and 1990s. Constantine Stassos is a Greek-American who hopes his life with Mary will be the 2.4 children and white picket fence of the American Dream. He works in constructing homes, and is busy constructing his own too – trying to overlook his own short temper and Mary’s slightly other-worldly lack of contentedness.

They have the children. Sensitive Billy who can’t keep himself from being combative; beautiful Susan who oscillates between confidence and uncertainty; eccentric Zoe with her thirst for the new. As they grow up, and as we see one or two scenes in the family home each year, the cracks start to show. The reader is taken through the perspectives of almost every character, and we can piece together who they are from within their minds and from the vantage of all their family members. I thought moments like this – where Susan is watching her younger sister climb a tree – said what paragraphs of exposition wouldn’t achieve:

”She’ll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising towards an accident, more endangered by the sky than by the earth.

And, later, they are at Billy’s university commencement ceremony – but he and his father have yet another falling out, and Billy disappears.

”We’re going,” Constantine told her. ”Come on.”

”That’s silly,” Susan said. ”If Billy’s being a brat, let him be a brat. There’s no reason for us to sit through commencement with a bunch of strangers.”

Mary couldn’t help marvelling at her elder daughter’s fearless shoulders, her staunch certainty, the crispness of her dress. She knew to call Billy a brat. She knew the word that would render his bad behaviour small and transitory. Mary couldn’t imagine why she so often felt irritated with Susan for no reason, and why Billy, the least respectful of her children, the most destructive, inspired in her only a dull ache that seemed to arise, somehow, from her own embarrassment.

The years keep going, and we get to the new generation – and to the new friends, lovers, and communities that the children move into. Billy is gay, as we have been able to tell from the outset – even if we hadn’t been prepped by the fact that it’s a Michael Cunningham novel. He doesn’t tell his parents, though they know. I shan’t spoil the paths of all the characters, but as the decades pass they include children, affairs, drug addiction, AIDS. There is a drowning that is the most beautifully written death scene I have ever read. People talk about ‘bad sex awards’ and how difficult it is to write good sex scenes, but I think writing good death scenes must be just as hard. For this one, Cunningham spends pages taking us through the waves and the thoughts, flowing in and out of metaphor. It is mesmeric and stunning and the greatest display of his extraordinary use of language in a novel that is full of extraordinary uses of language.

Some authors write a gripping plot that can make you race through a long book. Some write beautifully, pausing for striking imagery, and playing with how the right balance of sentences can reveal deep truths about their characters. Somehow, Cunningham is both. The novel is leisurely, allowing every moment to be saturated with meaning. But I also couldn’t put it down. I miss it so much. I don’t know how he does it, but Cunningham makes every cast of characters feel so vivid and real. There’s something in the way they speak to each other that would be easy to identify as Cunningham from a hundred paces.

I think The Snow Queen is still my favoured of the two Cunninghams I’ve just read, because there is something special in the way he condensed so much. But Flesh and Blood is extraordinary, and I’m sad at how few Cunninghams there are left on my shelf – just Specimen Days and a collection of short stories. But surely we must be due another novel before too long?

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm

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My love for Janet Malcolm continues apace. I’ve been buying up her books but initially hadn’t bothered with The Silent Woman (1993) because I’m not especially interested in Sylvia Plath. Then somebody told me, probably on here, that it’s much more about the ethics and process of writing a biography than it is about Plath – and that sounded completely up my street.

Malcolm sets out the key moral quandary at the heart of writing and reading biographies, and she puts it so well that I’m going to quote a long passage:

The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

One of the catalysts for this exploration was Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame, which Malcolm describes as ‘by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date’. This was 1993, and I’m sure plenty have been written since – but Malcolm tracks down all the biographers and memoirists who had written about Plath, critically and sympathetically, from personal experience and none. Because, though Malcolm admires Stevenson’s book, it was apparently received very critically – because it is sympathetic to Ted Hughes.

This is all before Hughes published Birthday Letters and the tide started to turn a little on seeing him as the villain of the piece. At the time, any criticism towards Plath or sympathy towards Hughes was seen as giving into the dominant force of the Plath estate: Olwyn Hughes. She is the most vivid character in Malcolm’s book. As Ted Hughes’ sister, she is the gatekeeper to Plath’s works and archives, and tries fiercely and hopelessly to determine the narrative. Well, again, Malcolm puts it best:

After three and a half years of acquaintance with Olwyn – of meetings, telephone conversations, and correspondence – I cannot say I know her much better than I did when she first appeared to me in her letter. But I have never seen anything in her of the egotism, narcissism, and ambition that usually characterise the person who welcomes journalistic notice in the belief that he can beat the odds and gain control of the narrative. Olwyn seems motivated purely by an instinct to protect her younger brother’s interests and uphold the honour of the family, and she pursues this aim with reckless selflessness. Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying in the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety.

And there is some truth to the reputation Stevenson’s book apparently had. She is so beset upon by Olwyn, every word of the biographer examined and questioned, that (in interviews with Malcolm) she describes the experience of writing the book as a kind of trauma. In many cases, she gave up. But when Malcolm meets and interviews the others who have written about Plath, she also pierces through all of their veneers, finding the real moral and personal choices behind their books (as well as the academic or supposedly objectives ones).

Malcolm is always arrestingly honest in a way that makes it seem like candour was the only option that occurred to her. She relays conversations with all her interviewees without even seeming to notice when they have exposed themselves and their flaws. There is an astonishing immediacy to it all and, given the discussions in the book about the difficulties of getting permission to quote from letters, I’m amazed that everybody involved signed up. Malcolm must be very persuasive. Some of the letters between Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes, for instance, are quite shocking. At one point, it’s almost like watching an abusive relationship from the inside.

As I say every time I write about a Malcolm book, she is the main draw. Don’t pick this up if you chiefly want to know the facts of Plath’s life. But if you’re at all interested in the ethics and practicalities of biography, or even just in how people interact when there is a lot at stake, then The Silent Woman is a brilliant and fascinating book.

My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

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A lot of the books I’m reading this year are ones I bought in 2011 – and I’m remembering that I bought a lot of books that year, because I only bought 24 in 2010 and I was making up for last time. One of those was My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq, published in 1998 and translated from French by Helen Stevenson in 1999. I thought it would be good to pick up now, because August is ‘women in translation month’ in book blogging land.

My husband’s disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I’d bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.

Did my husband disappear because that evening, after years of neglect on my part, irritated and tired at the end of a hard day’s work, he was suddenly incensed at having to go back down five flights of stairs in search of bread?

This is the opening paragraph of this short novel. I’m normally not at all drawn to books about people disappearing, because it seems such an overdone genre – but this is not a gritty crime novel. We don’t learn a great deal about the woman’s husband, as a person, nor about how the investigation is proceeding. Rather, we spend the 153 pages of this story in the mind of the unnamed narrator as she tries to understand the new world she is in. And as her perceptions start to splinter.

Darrieussecq’s writing, in Stevenson’s translation, is an impressive mixture of the spare and the poetic. Every sentence is beautiful and not at all showy. Whether it’s the narrator being momentarily distracted from her emotional turmoil by a sunset, or things on a kitchen counter, or reflections on what she misses most about her husband’s presence, Darrieussecq brings the perfect amount of weight and beauty to each observation. The writing becomes more fluid as the novel goes on, and felt positively Woolfean at times.

The same subtlety is seen in the way the novel progresses. The first sign of things not being quite ordinary are the horror tropes that recur. The narrator thinks about being stabbed in the shower, about being buried alive. Sometimes these thoughts are fears and sometimes they are warped comforts. And somehow this bleeds into her thinking about the nature of existence. She begins to wonder if her husband has somehow dematerialised.

I paced round the room, resigned. My husband had to be somewhere, maybe in form of a gas at the very outer edge of the universe, but he still had to be somewhere, leaning over the edge (what we have to image as its edge) and watching me now; like the dead, whom the living know are still present, stuck in the mist or under the table or behind the door, out in the barn rapping with their knuckles, in the kitchen bending the spoons, in the corridor rattling their chains and, for the more subtle among them, rippling the curtains when there’s no wind outside. My husband, in imitation of the dead, would send me a sign and bring me back to life.

As the days pass and she begins to hallucinate, it is not always clear what is happening and what is not. Being all in her voice, there is an evenness to it all – because she never questions her sanity, even as we see her confusion and unhappiness turn her mind.

The whole thing is mesmerically beautiful and quietly unsettling. The reader is always on shifting sand, and Darrieussecq is too clever a writer to let us stand firm even at the end.

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (25 Books in 25 Days #14)

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I still haven’t read any Proust, but I have read three books about reading Proust, or about Proust more generally. One was a few days ago (Proust’s Overcoat), and Phyllis Rose’s wonderful The Year of Reading Proust wasn’t that long ago. I’ve now made it a trio with 1997’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, published when Alain de Botton was only 28.

It’s an intriguing book that combines many different genres. It’s styled as some sort of self help guide – or rather a Proust help guide, where a reading of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu can help give life lessons. This covers all manner of things, from friendship to romance to how to read a book. But there are layers – and de Botton incorporates biographical details of Proust and a literary analysis of his writing. Indeed, it often seems like he is making no distinction between Proust’s letters, his fiction, and his actual life events – all are mixed together to draw out potential advice, filtered through a philosophical lens. Each section ends with a ‘the moral?’ conclusion.

The moral? To recognise that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the gratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

What holds it all together is de Botton’s engaging prose and his wit. And it’s often a very amusing book, being light with Proust’s life as well as the various friends, relatives, and critics who popped up in it. It’s all an odd concoction, and perhaps on that would make more sense reading after I’d read some Proust – but with enough verve and confidence to keep me enjoying it throughout.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

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I had a credit to use on Audible a while ago, and was looking to fill either 1980 or 1999 in A Century of Books – but couldn’t find anything that appealed. So, naturally, I took to Twitter. Twitter has been a real help with the tricky years, and Gareth kindly stepped forward with a suggestion…

I’d already read William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow – and the fact that I really liked it would have made me trust Gareth’s suggestion even if I didn’t already trust his taste (which I did). So I promptly downloaded An Equal Music (1999) by Vikram Seth and listened, without really checking what it was about.

Which is just as well. If I had looked up the plot or theme, I might not have bothered. Because it’s about ardent musicians, and I tend to find that difficult to read about. It’s the sort of novel where people non-ironically say “Oh, I’d love to study that score”, and spend years tracking down the perfect viola. I struggle whenever characters are snobs in any area of the arts, or have the attitude that being brilliant is more important than enjoying yourself. It’s why I really disliked Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows earlier this year (because the author seemed to share her characters’ views). And I would have been wary about it in Vikram Seth.

Well, it was certainly there, at least to an extent – and the main character (Michael) isn’t particularly likeable. He is obsessed with reconnecting with Julia, a woman he loved many years ago in Vienna – and has been trying to track her down, unsuccessfully, for some time. At the same time, he and his string quartet are preparing to perform… erm… some arrangement of some piece, I forget which. Or maybe it was something arranged for a quintet that is better known as a piano piece, or something like that. (Again, the problem of listening to an audiobook – I can’t go back and check!) Of course, he does find her – she is married, with a child, and there is a twist in the narrative that I shan’t spoil, but is done very satisfyingly and intelligently.

Lovers of classical music (and, dare I say it, music snobs) will get a lot out of this that I probably didn’t. I do also wonder how much one might miss if you don’t play the piano and violin – I play both, which helped me understand various discussion points and technical moments, though I don’t think any of them were particularly essential and could probably be skated through.

Why did I like it, when it had quite a few ingredients that turn me off? Partly it was the excellent reading by Alan Bates, who never tries to do “voices” (except where accents are needed for, say, the American characters) but manages to convey character entirely through tone. The audiobook also meant they could include sections of music when they were referred to as being played, which was rather lovely. But mostly it was Seth’s quality of writing. He is very good at detailed depictions of changing emotions and relationships, so that one is deeply interested even if not particularly sympathetic.

I don’t know if I’m ready for the doorstopper A Suitable Boy just yet, but I’m very glad Gareth suggested this one. And it’s a useful reminder that good writing can overcome all the prejudices I have in terms of topic and character. I suppose every theme has its variations.

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

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I was finding 1993 quite difficult to fill in my century of books, and I asked people on Twitter which of my 1993 books they’d recommend that I pick up. It turned out that I didn’t have one of them on my shelves any longer, a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I did have Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason I wasn’t especially keen to read it, but enough people on Twitter convinced me that I should give it a go that I took it away on holiday and, guess what – it’s amazing.

This isn’t the first Kingsolver novel I’ve read, in fact it’s the third. One of those is her most famous, The Poisonwood Bible, which I actually didn’t like as much as most people seem to have done. I suppose my problem was with her painting this ogreish portrait of the patriarchal missionary, and then implying (or at least I inferred) that he was intended to represent the whole world of missionaries. It felt a little lazy. But before that I read The Bean Trees, I think before I started blogging, and it turns out that Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to that. I should say from the outset that it’s fine to read this novel independently, and in fact I couldn’t remember very much about The Bean Trees that except for the fact that I liked it. Pigs in Heaven tells you everything you need to know about what came before.

The main thing you need to know from that novel is that Taylor adopted young Native American girl called Turtle, given to her by a stranger in a car park. The years have passed, and Taylor is a devoted mother, unable to imagine a life without her young daughter. She is also in a relationship with a musician-of-sorts, called Jax. I rather loved reading their conversations, which were believably affectionate while maintaining a constant undercurrent of uncertainty – just how much are they joking and how much are real tensions coming to the surface? It is something dramatic that starts to change the life Taylor has made for herself, even though that dramatic thing happens to somebody else. While on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, her daughter sees a man fall into a dangerously deep cave – being so young, Turtle doesn’t realise the gravity of this until afterwards, and assumes her mother knows what has happened and is unconcerned. It is only when bringing its to Taylor’s attention that a rescue mission is mounted – despite police initially being reluctant to believe that the 4 year old has not imagined the whole thing.

The man is rescued, and Turtle becomes something of a celebrity – at least temporarily – and is invited onto an episode of Oprah for children who have saved lives. This catches the attention of a lawyer, Annawake, who decides to intervene. She is from the Cherokee Nation herself, and knows that the adoption which Taylor describes is not legal. With her own history of a brother who was taken away from family and community, Annawake sees it as her responsibility to reunite Turtle with her heritage – even if that means taking her away from her mother. (The pigs in Heaven, incidentally, are stars – a constellation you may know as the Seven Sisters.)

There are plenty of novelists who use a moral quandary as the centre of a narrative, to greater or lesser levels of success. To be honest, I am likely to run from a novel that describes itself as issue-driven – and the great thing about Kingsolver is that it never feels as though the ‘issue’  is the driving force. Nor is there any sense that there is a correct answer – as a white person myself, I am very likely to be drawn towards the argument that a child should not be separated from her adoptive mother, but Kingsolver has characters like Annawake who can vocalise that this sense of priorities is not any more objective than those which might make somebody wants to reunite a child with her ancestral community. And so what drives this novel, perfectly, is character.

Unlike The Poisonwood Bible, there are no cartoonish villains. There are simply people who are trying to do the right thing – or, with some of the more incidental characters, have lost any sense of what the right thing might be.

Women on their own run in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

That is the opening paragraph of this multi-generational novel. Alice is Taylor’s mother, and has recently made her own possibly ill-advised marriage. The family do not have the ingrained traditions of the Cherokee Nation, but they have their own localised one of women being alone – though none of the women in this book are alone as it starts, it hangs over them like a threat, or occasionally like a happy promise. Taylor’s fear of losing Turtle means they go on the run together, and Kingsolver masterfully weaves a road trip novel into this multifaceted narrative – with the possibilities that brings for funny or strange or poignant temporary characters.

As I say, it is character that is foremost – with their reflections on anything from their choice of words to their ultimate fate. Kingsolver uses her premise to give us a rich, rich portrait of many different people – even when they’re not the most pleasant people, she makes us want to spend time with them. It is riveting, as well as beautifully written. It is also evocative, not just of place but of being. I suppose what I mean by that is that it is wholly immersive.

I read a lot of books, as do we all, and it’s not often that I miss the world that I have been in once it is finished. But I wish I were back in Kingsolver’s world – and I think I might be left in the curious position of wanting to reread the original to this sequel, just to stay in that world. Hopefully that won’t leave me in an indefinite loop, but if it does, there are worse places to be. (And, to escape that loop, which Kingsolver novels would you recommend?)

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon

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The Devil’s Candy is a brilliant book with a terrible title. I can’t even remember the bizarre reason given for the title, but I bought Salamon’s 1992 book after hearing it recommended on the funny Australian cultural podcast Chat 10: Looks 3 – and posting about it here, I was encouraged to start reading it straightaway by some positive comments. For those I am grateful, as this is an astonishing book.

It doesn’t feel like something that would necessarily be up my street. It’s non-fiction, as Salamon painstakingly follows the creation of the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s famous novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. I haven’t read Wolfe’s novel, and I haven’t seen the film, and I don’t really have any interest in doing either of those things. That doesn’t matter at all. It’s completely fascinating – and a lot of that is to do with the writing and, importantly, the pacing that Salamon brings to the book.

The Devil’s Candy starts at the early stages of casting and trying to establish a final script. Not knowing who’s in the final film was an advantage for me, as it meant I had no idea who’d get the role during the discussions and auditions. I didn’t know what sort of film it would be, either, so conversations between script supervisors and directors and whatnot had genuine tension. From here, we go through 400+ pages in which Salamon observes pre-production, shooting, and post-production. Nothing is raced through; nothing is considered trivial. We spend a lot of time watching the second unit trying to get the perfect shot of a plane landing; we follow in minute detail the attempts to find a courthouse for filming. We are party to the recasting of a role to make the film seem less racist; we see an actress’s insecurities as she has to do part of a scene naked.

To anybody with a passing interest in film, or in the mechanics of an enormous production of any kind comes together, it is completely fascinating. It’s not unduly technical at any point, but you get a sense of the size of people’s roles without needing to know quite how it all works. And the central figure is the director, Brian De Palma. As director, every moment is his vision – and we follow the highs and lows of his feelings about the film (particularly as costs spiral and the studio executives get increasingly involved). It is an absorbing character study of what drives him, and how he takes on such a challenging role, all revealed piece by piece, day by day.

He may be the central figure, but it feels like the whole cast and crew are open to us. Particularly the crew; you can read between the lines that Salamon didn’t get much out of Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. We see what they do, but we don’t learn how they feel. Not that Salamon ever reveals her methods or, indeed, herself. I loved Janet Malcolm’s very individual and subjective reportage – this is the flip side. Salamon never mentions doing interviews – or, indeed, being on the set at all. She is absent from the page, and this gives the prose a feeling of god-like omniscience. She is not so much in the room as in their minds. It is oddly hypnotising.

De Palma was tense. Broderick was upset with him. She’d been insulted when he complained about the service at the restaurant and didn’t believe him when he insisted that running down Madeo was a standing joke between him and his brother Bart. One of the things they liked about the place was complaining about it.

When she woke up grumbling that she had a hangover, he said, “No wonder, you certainly had enough to drink.” Broderick was furious and hurt. She told him he;d ignored her all evening, that he hadn’t even touched her, and now he was attacking her. De Palma felt bewildered. He distinctly remembered putting his arm around her. As they rehashed the evening, they felt as if they’d been to two different parties.

The great success of this book is how steady and unshowy it is. That steadiness, the pacing I mentioned earlier, means that nothing is rushed or overdramatised; the lack of false tension means that every moment comes together into something special. And because nothing is showy, it feels as though there is no filter or bias at all – it feels as though we are there.

It’s an extraordinary book. Yes, if it were about a film I loved I might have found it still more captivating – but there is something in the fact that The Bonfire of the Vanities was a flop that makes this still more interesting. Particularly as it is not forecast in Salamon’s writing, and even the gradual realisation that the film will get mediocre reviews and make a sizeable loss doesn’t come as a ‘gotcha’ – it is part of the same pacing, as the film’s journey sort of peters out, and the book concludes. Not like anything I’ve read before, but definitely one of my books of the year.

25 Books in 25 Days: #14 Touching the Rock

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I’m out four nights of the next five, so I’m slightly nervous about how I’m going to fit the week’s reading in… but today I didn’t have much on after church, so I could take my time over Touching the Rock (1990) by John M. Hull. I was aware of the book, because Oliver Sacks writes about it in The Mind’s Eye and elsewhere, but it was a recommendation from my friend Sanjay that made me actually go and get a copy.

The subtitle of this memoir is ‘An experience of blindness’, and that’s exactly what it was. Hull had various issues with his eyesight for his whole life, but it was in his early forties – with two children and a third shortly to be born – that he lost his sight completely. By the time he was writing the book, he could no longer even tell light from dark.

A day on which it was merely warm would, I suppose, be quite a nice day but thunder makes it more exciting, because it suddenly gives a sense of space and distance. Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realise that I am in a big place, whereas before there was nothing there at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night. The same is true for the blind person of the sound of the wind in the trees. It creates trees; one is surrounded by trees wheres before there was nothing.

Each section is dated, and it’s sort of a diary – but it’s really a collection of descriptions, reactions, and philosophy about being blind. And it’s done in such a fascinating way. He writes about how other people react, and how they get it right or wrong – from treating him like a child to guiding him incorrectly. He writes about his young children gradually growing to understand why daddy can’t see. And he describes his understanding of the world so patiently and ably – about how concepts of space and time completely change; how small talk and friendships become different entities. He also talks about his faith and God, though less than I had expected.

The title is about ‘touching the rock on the other side of despair’. If there is despair, and I’m sure there was, he somehow manages to keep the book almost absent of it. He has the accuracy of the scientist with the slow, unfolding narrative of the storyteller, and the stark honesty of the memoirist. It’s an extraordinary book.

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

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One of the books I took to the Peak District was An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks – a copy I bought in Washington DC, and thus one of those lovely floopy-floppy US paperbacks, rather than the stiffer UK ones. I’ve written about quite a lot of Sacks books over the years, and he’s one of my favourite writers (and people – though of course I didn’t know him personally). He’s certainly my favourite non-fiction writer – and that’s why it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t love An Anthropologist on Mars quite as much as some of the others. It’s not where I’d recommend to start.

The themes and approach in this book aren’t wildly different from many of his others – it was perhaps the structure and specific topics that left me a little cold, but I’ll come on to that later. Sacks divides the book into seven sections, each concerned with a different patient and Sacks’ diagnosis and study of their lives. Rather than summarise them all myself, I’m going to shamelessly plagiarise the Wikipedia entry:

  • The Case of the Colourblind Painter discusses an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colour, due to brain damage.
  • The Last Hippie describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s.
  • A Surgeon’s Life describes Sacks’ interactions with Dr. Carl Bennett, a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating.
  • To See and Not See is the tale of Shirl Jennings, a man who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery. This is one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such an early age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing.
  • The Landscape of His Dreams discusses Sacks’ interactions with Franco Magnani, an artist obsessed with his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. Although Magnani has not seen his village in many years, he has constructed a detailed, highly accurate, three-dimensional model of Pontito in his head.
  • Prodigies describes Sacks’ relationship with Stephen Wiltshire, a young autistic savant described by Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain”.
  • An Anthropologist on Mars describes Sacks’ meeting with Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who is a world-renowned designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University.

As you can see, the title of the collection comes from the final essay – it is how Grandin describes her interaction with the world, while trying to comprehend social mores. I have a thing about titles – they’re often so important in how we understand a book – and was a bit annoyed that this collection took a comment by Grandin and made it seem as though Sacks were the anthropologist in question.

I’ll start with the positives – the chapter ‘To See and Not See’ was completely fascinating. Jennings, the patient, technically has the ability to see – but since he cannot remember ever seeing before, he has no concept of what sight is. Having lived for decades without seeing, he cannot understand the idea of visual distance, or representation (paintings mean nothing to him). Sacks explores how our comprehension of sight creates a world around us – and the very human reaction when someone is expected to understand their world in a fundamentally different way. The footnotes lead to various useful precedents, and it’s an extremely well put together chapter.

Indeed, the first three chapters before this were also good – though not with quite the same philosophical and psychological interest for me. Sacks is very humane and empathetic in portraying (in the first chapter) a painter who can no longer see colour – recognising not just the scientific elements of this, but the enormous changes and challenges the painter must face in ways that non-artistic people wouldn’t. On the flip side, Sacks writes with admiration of Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s – awed by how he maintains his professional life.

The final three chapters were less interesting topics to me (though it’s very possible that you’d find them fascinating, if they happen to be areas of interest to you). But there were problems there that existed even in the chapters I found up my street – everything is slightly too drawn out, and without the pacing of Sacks’ best work. He lingers just that little too long on every insight, not deepening our relationship with the patient, but slowing its progress down. There are fewer tangential details and anecdotes than in other of his books, too, and it’s impossible not to wonder if this was largely a collection of things that didn’t make it into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s still Sacks, so I still liked it – if it had been the first book I’d read by him, I’m sure I’d have loved it – but it was a little bit of a disappointment after reading some of Sacks’ brilliant, brilliant work. If you’ve yet to read anything by him, head to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Hallucinations instead.