Author: StuckinaBook

In A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor – #1961Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

I have steadily made my way through all of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, and there’s a strong chance that this is the final one on my reading list? She is very like William Maxwell – that the amount I like her is dependent very much on my mood, and seems to shift almost hour by hour. When I’m in the right mood, she is an exceptionally perceptive, amusing, precise writer. When I’m in the wrong mood, her novels just seem to wash over me.

Thankfully, I think I was in broadly the right mood for In A Summer Season. Like Love by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I read for the previous club, this concerns an age-gap romance where the woman is rather older. Unlike Love, though, the romancing has all happened offscreen already. Kate Heron is a widow who has now married a man ten years younger than her – Dermot, who is filmed with ideas for businesses, but little acumen and even less willingness to see things through. Kate is wealthy enough to mean he doesn’t need to buckle down to anything – though there isn’t really any indication that he has married her for her money. More on that marriage later.

Also living with them are Kate’s two children from her previous marriage – Tom, who works for his grandfather’s family business and is desperate to prove himself, and Louisa, who is a faithful Christian but perhaps equally interested in the priest as she is in the faith. Taylor captures the disconnect between people who live alongside each other, even when they care for each other. One person’s priorities and obsessions will not be another’s. They live parallel lives, unable or unwilling to communicate the depth of their experiences.

Despite being a widow with two grown children, Kate is still pretty young – by modern standards, at least. Yet there are oceans between her and the younger generation. This is her, responding to a remark made by Tom’s current girl:

“Blue suits you so,” Prue now said.

“They condescend,” Kate thought. “They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish, and are led by that desire into an excess of insincerity. They are appalled for us that we are middle-aged.” She could remember trying to protect her own parents from the fact that their lives were virtually over.

She supposed blue did suit her, she agreed vaguely, to add something to the conversation; but talk about clothes bored her. It was like talk about sex. It had an enervating quality which had nothing to do with the subject herself.

Lest we forget, Kate is only in her 40s! And I love this paragraph, because it shows what Taylor does so often. Beneath the veneer of well-to-do people interacting amicably is a depth of feeling that continues to swirl and flow, even while the people obey the conventions of their class and milieu. I think Taylor is a very sexual writer, but it is seldom in the actions on the page. It is, instead, in the minds, motivations, and memories of her characters.

And what of the marriage between Kate and Dermot? In Kate’s mind, we see her considering Dermot as hovering between her generation and her children’s generation – ‘on the mezzanine floor as it were’. But it is not only their age that creates a disparity between them – though that is the factor that gossipy Aunt Ethel returns to, and the reason that most people attribute any fractures to. Instead, really, it is a clash of personalities. It’s clear that Kate’s first husband was more sensible, restrained, dispassionate, and that Kate has turned to an exciting, unreliable man who can bring something spontaneous and passionate out of her. But, in reality, it seems to bring out a reluctant maternal relationship instead.

There were voices in the kitchen, and then Kate came bustling in. Ever since a few evenings before, when Dermot returning drunk and late for dinner had spoken harshly to her, she had moved in a bright little whirlwind of her own making, with not a minute to spare for anyone. She was always on the wing, setting out on one errand after another, and no one could hope to detain her or say a word that would be listened to. Their words were what she dreaded – their thoughts she knew – and, trapped at mealtimes, she warded them off with a torrent of her own. The flow was more easily come by when she had had several drinks. In attaining this end, Dermot, full of uneasy contrition, was ready to encourage her.

A major flaw in In A Summer Season, to my mind, is that we never truly believe this is a happy marriage. We are told that they are deeply in love, but we are never really shown it. The quarrels and disconnect is the norm from the outset of the novel, and Dermot is too sulky and selfish for us to really believe that Kate has ever found an equal partner in him. There is a jarring difference between what Taylor expects us to believe about the marriage and what she is putting on the page, and that was a shame. Because we don’t really see emerging cracks – we just see the narrative catching up with what we’re already seeing. (And that’s when someone from Kate’s past comes back on the scene, but – unlike the blurb of my edition – I won’t spoil that.)

Because of this telling-but-not-showing, this isn’t one of my favourite Taylor novels. But it still definitely has her trademarks: complex and interesting characters, beautiful writing, and sharp wit. Just look at the last words of this paragraph, about Kate’s business-owner father:

At half past five, the factory gates were opened, and a policeman on point duty tried to untangle the traffic. In the swarm of bicycles, even Sir Alfred’s car was held up. He stared irritably before him, like a wasp caught in a spider’s web, impatient that he, for all his power, could not escape. His chaffeur blew softly but constantly on the horn, making slow progress through swerving and colliding bicycles. Nevertheless, Sir Alfred would not for anything have set out five minutes earlier to ease the congestion. He preferred to leave and be seen leaving at the same time as his men. There seemed some virtue in this to him, and he would not have believed that other people saw the thing differently. ‘I’ve never asked a man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, or haven’t done,’ he liked to say. This was untrue as well as uninteresting.

Just sublime. So, overall, I find the usual things to admire and enjoy in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, and I was mostly in the right mood to value them. I just wish she’d made Dermot a slightly more sympathetic character so that the trajectory of the plot had more impact.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

#149: Do We Like Campus Novels? and Two Books By Muriel Spark

StuckinaBook Tea or Books? , 3 Comments

Muriel Spark and campus novels – welcome to episode 149!

In the first half of this episode, we answer Lisa’s question: do we like campus novels? In the second half, we compare two novels by Muriel Spark. Not necessarily the Muriel Spark novels I thought we would be reading… turns out, Rachel read The Comforters instead of The Bachelors, so we compare that with Symposium instead!

If you’d like to come and see Rachel’s play, full details are here. I’ll be there on the Saturday!

You can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given

And, of course, do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any questions or comments!

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Hilary Mantel
Honourable Estates by Vera Brittain
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
Yesterday in the Back Lane by Bernice Rubens
The Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens
On the Calculation of Volume vol.2 by Solvej Balle
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Stoner by John Williams
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch
The Small Room by May Sarton
Anthony Trollope
The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge
Nice Work by David Lodge
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Masters by C.P. Snow
Catherine Carter by Pamela Hansford Johnson
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The History Boys by Alan Bennett
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Seasoned Timber by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
According to Mark by Penelope Lively
Stet by Diana Athill
A Bit of the Apple by Lennie Goodings
84, Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark

Pen To Paper by Pamela Frankau – #1961Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 7 Comments

Pen to Paper : A Novelist's Notebook

I’m going to assume it was Brad’s review of Pen To Paper by Pamela Frankau that put it on my radar. I’ve only read a handful of her prodigious output, but I think she can be a brilliant, and brilliantly unusual, writer. She can also be a pretty poor, melodramatic one. And so I was intrigued about how she’d write about the craft of writing – for that is exactly what Pen To Paper is. (Incidentally, Brad’s review dates it to 1962, but I assume that was an American publication date or something – my copy was published in 1961, so fear not re: it’s eligibility for the 1961 Club.)

Well, I say that. It’s nothing like the sort of ‘how to write’ book that might be published nowadays. Doubtless that was the sort of topic suggested to her by a publisher, but Frankau has really written an autobiography through the lens of her writing. We don’t discover much that is personal (except in relationship with her father, more of which later) but we do get to take an entertaining journey through her career, alongside a rather subjective dose of writing advice.

Frankau’s first novel was published when she was still a teenager, and she wrote about one a year after that. She does seem to assume a little knowledge of her oeuvre, but I think you could enjoy Pen To Paper even if it were your first Frankau book. Certainly, most of what she says about writing tends towards the broad rather than the specific – for instance, her habit of the Rough and the Smooth. The ‘Rough’ is her rough draft, written on the right-hand side of notebooks, getting down the ideas and the characters and seeing what happens. The left-hand side is reserved for all sorts of edits and notes and self-recriminations – and the Smooth is the next draft, in which any manner of things may have changed. The idea of redrafting isn’t particularly unusual, but I enjoyed the way Frankau wrote about it, and the leap that is somehow made between a rough smashing-out of possibilities into (say) something as complex and brilliant as A Wreath for the Enemy.

When it comes to details of writing, she discusses such things as first vs third person, how to craft dialogue, when to use adjectives, how to vary sentence length etc etc. These are the bread-and-butter of ‘how to’ guides, but so much engaging in Frankau’s voice than in other people’s. That isn’t because her advice is particularly novel, but because of the tone it is given in: that of an author who has won her spurs, and has the right to a little didacticism, but can also be self-deprecating when need be.

What I found most interesting, though, was when advice turns into memoir. Here she is, writing about sex in books(!):

A scene that I saw with peculiar vividness and intensity before I wrote it once fooled me completely. It was concerned with lust. My character, over whose shoulder events were observed, was a strenuous, priggish fellow who had lived an asectic life. Lust took him unawares. After staring, in an unseemly way and with the crudest thoughts, at a woman whom he was meeting for the first time, he finally picked up a prostitute on his way home. I have made it sound rather silly; but it was an honest scene, a true and necessary stage in the life of the man. I wasn’t writing about sexual desire for my own fun, nor for the fun of excitable readers. Even so, when it was written, I was a little leery of it. Wasn’t it too frank, too violent for its context?

When I chanced to look at it again, about two years later, I was shocked. Not, as yuou might imagine, by discovering that I indeed gone too far. I hadn’t gone anywhere. The exposition of lust simply wasn’t there. What disturbed me in the writing of it had been thought and not said. The words were missing, the scene almost meaningless. Not as much as an overtone… The vivid apprehension in my own mind had deluded me and it was must have been a powerful delusion to last right through the reading of galleys and page-proof.

I suspect this happens far more often than one knows. I may be easy with the words and the words may even, on occasion, be easy with me, but this is not to say that they have passed my message accurately to you.

These sorts of stories from her own experience aren’t functionally illuminating, but they are interesting and do provide some sort of general rule. Though I can’t really imagine anybody picking this up with the intention of using it to write their own novel – this is much more about spending time with Frankau, and better understanding what motivates and informs her writing. Which is, indeed, incredibly idiosyncratic. I work as a writer for a charity, which involves plenty of proofreading, and I felt a pang of sympathy for her proofreader here:

There is the word ‘grey’. To my mind ‘grey’ and ‘gray’ are two different shades of colour. ‘Grey’ has a blue tint and ‘gray’ a brown. So I spell the word according to the colour I want and the printer’s proof-reader changes it back to uniformity throughout. Then I change it again.

On the other hand, I did cheer her on here:

But American spelling will always be a minor trial to the English writer. I have expressed my feelings about ‘airplane’. There’s a clause in my American contract forbidding its use and likewise that of ‘mustache’.

Speaking of Americans, quite a bit of Pen To Paper is Frankau’s prolonged culture-shock at the US. Let’s gloss over her list of comparisons of Brits and Americans (e.g. Americans: slow / Brits: quicker) to an amusing moment that apparently scuppered her reputation across the Atlantic for a good number of years. She was writing her impressions of America for the Evening Standard, back in the days when British people were routinely paid to do such things.

I wrote, among other things: ‘Life in California is very beautiful, very hygienic, very tiring and very expensive.’ The editor, or somebody, left out ‘beautiful’.

Oops! Along the way, Frankau does have plenty to say about publishers, editors etc, including the editors of magazines. While she wrote an extraordinary number of novels, it seems that she didn’t have the same success in the periodicals and journals that were the mainstay of many authors’ earnings during Frankau’s career. While Pen To Paper is not very open about many aspects of Frankau’s personal life, she does go into a lot of detail about finances – and how little she has managed to retain from her profession. She rather self-generously ascribes this to a heart for helping other people out, and to the reluctance of editors to pay her well, but I did also wonder if our definitions of being without money would coincide. Still, she is a lot more open about the earnings of mid-century writing than I’ve seen anywhere except Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and that was illuminating.

And, ah yes, her father. Gilbert Frankau, who was once a big name author. She describes some fraught periods between them, and their apparently very different approaches to writing, and it does sound rather like they didn’t see eye-to-eye on many things. And yet she allots the final 50 pages or so to a memoir of Gilbert, which does feel rather awkwardly tacked onto the end. I imagine she would not have been published as a 19-year-old without his fame, so he is relevant to her literary career – and I would have loved to delve more into the tensions in their relationship, which were rather compelling when they came up – but I could have done without this sudden turn in tone and theme at the end.

But that aside, Pen To Paper is an enjoyable, very idiosyncratic book. It’s definitely more about Frankau than about the craft of writing, but I preferred it that way. She may not have set out to write it as an autobiography, and some of her cards are kept close to her chest, but I definitely ended it feeling much better informed about who she is as a person and as a writer.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Abbie and Arthur by Dane Chandos – #1961Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 5 Comments

I think my friend Caroline only ever gave me two books. One was A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau, and the other was Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos. Which goes to show that she had exceptional taste, and also knew my taste very well. Sadly, Caroline died eight years ago and I’ll never get to ask her for recommendations any more – but I loved spending a decade in book group with her, and her recommendation legacy lives on: twelve years after I read the original, I finally read the sequel to Abbie.

Abbie and Arthur cover, showing a cartoon car on a blue background

Abbie and Arthur, like the previous book, is really concerned with the extraordinary, monstrous, eccentric Abbie, and told through a mix of her letters and a narrative from the perspective of her nephew, Dane. The ‘Arthur’ of the title is her quiet, put-upon, secretly brilliant husband – he appears just as much in the first book, so it’s really a question of the authors needing to find a variant title, I suppose.

Dane is one of the few people that she cares about. For the most part, she is selfish and domineering, though with a soft spot for husband, nephew and (particularly) any and all of the animal kingdom. Here she is, intercepting a hunt:

“Butcher-in-Chief!” I retorted. “Your horse’s hooves are trampling sacred soil and your old grandmother, could she witness such sacrilege, would turn in her grave not ten yards from where we stand!” (A pardonable exaggeration, I consider, since the pink granite angel which surmounts her must weigh all of five tons.) “Call off your hounds!” I concluded.

He shouted again.

I shouted back:

“The colour of your coat, bloody as it is and matching your speech and, I am told, your politics, merely exaggerates the brutality of your so-called sport. A more appropriate colour for your cowardly pastime would be ywllow, a hue which only your colleagues of the Berkeley are men enough to sport!”

Her moral compass is wonky, though. In the course of this book, she (probably?) burns down the house of a friend in order to persuade her to move nearer, and (probably?) murders someone in the aftermath of an accident at sea. And yet…

What do I mean by ‘and yet’? I suppose I mean that you can’t help loving Abbie, despite all that. The novel plays out on a heightened level where these acts of ludicrous selfishness feel more like pantomime than malice. There is a neighbour with whom she has a lengthy feud – in the previous book, Abbie was thwarted while trying to steal her irises, and now Abbie considers this a theft of her irises – and yet, we are told, Abbie sat up with her for many nights when she was extremely ill. And this act of kindness does, somehow, seem to balance her bizarre excesses of immortality. Which is an impressive feat for an author. Abbie is exhuberant, irrepressible, and the success of the book weighs almost entirely on her character – and succeeds.

But my favourite scenes are when Abbie is outwitted. For the most part, in Abbie and Arthur, this is done by Arthur himself – and he is a star, the Richard to her Hyacinth Bucket, endlessly patient but not above a sharp word now and then, and manages to maintain his own moral path.

Perhaps my favourite moment in the book is a subtle jibe from the authors. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘that reminds me of Aunt Mame by Patrick Dennis’, then you’re not alone. It was published between the first and second Abbie books, and this is how Abbie ends one of her letters – for those not in the know, ‘Même’ is French for (among other things) ‘same’:

PPPS. – I am told that one of your dear Mother’s fellow-countrymen has written a book called, I think, Auntie Même, in which the central character seems to be oddly like me (or so Maud says). See if you can get me a copy (as soon as the book is remaindered), as I wish to look into the matter & sue if feasible.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff

StuckinaBook All , , , 29 Comments

Sad to say, though I have eked them out for years, I’ve now read my final book by Helene Hanff. I bought my copy of Underfoot in Show Business in 2012, but I’ve pictured the lovely new edition from Manderley Press.

Hanff is, of course, best known for the delightful 84, Charing Cross Road, and aficiandos of that book will recognise some of the people and incidents in Underfoot in Show Business – you might recall, for instance, that Hanff made money writing for American detective dramas. Or perhaps you think fondly of Maxine, who snuck nylons onto the desk of No.84 – she figures large in this book. This book actually came first, and it is a bold, brash, delightful announcement of her arrival on the literary scene.

What role did Hanff play in showbusiness? Well, she wanted to make it as a playwright. The book charts her attempts to succeed in this select sphere – and very funny it is too. While she is something of a ball-buster (if I may be permitted some American lingo) in her most famous book, here her humour is very self-deprecating. From the way she frames her stories, we can be pretty confident that she will not make it as a playwright – even though there is definitely early promise. She wins various scholarships and awards, she gets phone calls and meetings with some of the most important people in the theatrical world, and she seems to write and re-write plays at the drop of a hat.

We never get a sense of what her writing for the stage is actually like – Underfoot in Show Business is not that sort of memoir. It’s really just an excuse for Hanff to laugh at herself – and, for good measure, everyone else involved in this strange world. The cheerful insincerity of producers and agents, the breathless optimism of everyone, and that colossal waste of time that dogs everyone’s attempt to ‘make it’. (The book may be 65 years old, and about a time even earlier, but I suspect a lot of things have not changed.)

Producer No.3 was elderly and semiretired but he’d had a legendary career in his day.

“Yours is the first play he’s been interested in in five years,” said my agent, impressed. “He wants to take you to lunch.”

I met the legendary producer for lunch at the Algonquin, where for two hours he talked of his producing days, the great stars and playwrights he’d discovered and the contrasting sorry state of the contemporary theatre. When we parted, he wished me every success and certainly hoped one of these younger fellows would have the sense to produce my play. (Agent’s translation: “I guess he’s broke.”)

Maxine only hovers around the peripheraries of 84, Charing Cross Road, but here she is a star. Flame-haired, vibrant, an excellent actress and totally tone-deaf, Hanff basks in her star-quality and her friendship – while sharing similar levels of disappointment and picking-yourself-up-again. Maxine is not a pseudonym – you can look up Maxine Stuart, to see her successful, if not world-grabbing, acting career. She is such a whirlwind and a breath of fresh air, from using pilfered stamps to pay bills to getting a role in a musical without revealing her inability to sing. You certainly can’t help but love her. Maxine and Helene have the sort of friendship we all long for.

Hanff does eventually get regular writing work for TV, for which she is grateful while still finding and delighting in the ridiculous elements of it. Particularly tricky are the unspoken restrictions of TV detective dramas – the tiny cast meaning the list of suspects is often down to two, and the sponsorship by a cigar company meaning they have to scotch a plot point involving cigarette ash. It’s fascinating.

And when she isn’t working directly in writing, she gets a job reading for a studio – making her way through recent novels, and writing up reports about whether or not they had potential for adaptation. It sounds an other-worldly job, but I do have a friend who did the same thing until she retired a few years ago. While it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of her memoir, I think it was the part I found most interesting and entertaining. And I’m going to leave you with her hot-take on one of the books she had to read…

Well, on the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph’s office had been open at that hour, I’d have phoned and quit my job.

What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend — taking notes on all place names, characters’ names and events therein — was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read: “Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday…” and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.

I also remember the bill I turned in:

For Reading and Summarizing:

TITLE: Lord of the Rings
AUTHOR: J. R. R. Tolkien
Volume I: $20.00
Volume II: $20.00
Volume III: $20.00
Mental Torture: $40.00

TOTAL: $100

They paid it.

Ha! I’d recommend absolutely anything by Hanff, and Underfoot in Show Business is no exception. What an irrepressible, witty, vital writer. What fun to be able to spend more time with her.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

The Chateau by William Maxwell – #1961Club

StuckinaBook All , , , 24 Comments

Apparently, I bought The Chateau by William Maxwell back in 2009. Worse, I got it through the post, so I was clearly impatient to be getting into it – and I remember that I relatively quickly started it and read about 100 pages. At which point I stalled, and for many years there was a bookmark at the 100-page mark, taunting me.

Thank goodness for the 1961 Club. This was the first book I started for the challenge, and I went in with some trepidation. Although I remembered very little about the plot beyond the premise – a young American couple, Harold and Barbara, are visiting France shortly after the Second World War – I did remember that I found it very slow. Having now successfully got to the end, I haven’t changed my mind on that. The Chateau is slow – ponderously, intentionally, glacially slow – but in a way that, in the right mood, is an extraordinary experience.

Harold and Barbara set off with high hopes for their holiday. They anticipate romance, beauty, and the comradeship of a nation which has recently won a war with theirs. In the opening chapters, we follow their train journey through the country – drinking in the beauty, not yet disillusioned. It is strange that the woman whose chateau they are staying in hasn’t come to the station to meet them, but as they are taken in humbler transport across the countryside, they are beguiled by the prospect of their new, temporary home:

Before long they had a glimpse of the chateau, across the fields. The trees hid it from view. Then they turned in, between two gate posts, and drove up among curving cinder drive, and saw the house again, much closer now. It was of white limestone, with tall French windows and a steep slate roof. Across the front with a raised terrace with a low box hedge and a stone balustrade. To the right of the house there was an enormous Lebanon cedar, whose branches fell like dark green waves, and a high brick wall with ornamental iron gates. To their eyes, accustomed to foundation planting and wisteria or rose trellises, the facade looked a little bare and new. The truck went through the gate and into a courtyard and stopped. For a moment they were aware of much racket the engine made, and then M. Fleury turned the ignition off to save gasoline and after that it was the silence they heard. They sat waiting with their eyes on the house and finally a door burst open and a small, thin, black-haired woman came hurrying out. She stopped a few feet from the truck and noted bleakly to M. Fleury, who touched his beret but said nothing. We must look very strange sitting in the back of the truck with our luggage crammed in around us, Harold thought. But on the other hand, it was rather strange that there was no one at the station to meet them.

Mme Vienot is the woman and their hostess. They are her paying guests – the sort of visitors who are clearly needed to help with the ancient family’s dire financial state, but who have to go through a pretence of familiarity. It puts them in an awkward position. When the house doesn’t have all the provisions that the advertisement declared – hot water, bicycles to borrow – they cannot complain as they would in a hotel. They are, after all, guests of a sort.

Maxwell has crafted such real people. We feel the awkwardness of the mismatch between hope and actuality – and, more than that, their determination to find the best in the chateau. Harold is occasionally indignant; Barbara is occasionally conciliatory. And there is much to love, too. It is still beautiful, it is still France. True, nobody precisely explains the protocol (they are embarrassed to learn, from other guests, that they should have stayed longer after the meal in the evening) – and, true, Mme Vienot is curiously distant and unfriendly, and Americans are not as beloved as these two Americans had presupposed – but this doesn’t entirely spoil the delight they are taking in the adventure. They are young and in love and passionate, and this is not a novel about disillusionment. It is a gentle novel about a culture clash and the triumph of human nature to persist through it.

I found Harold and Barbara fascinating characters. We’re used to novels about two people falling in love, and perhaps used to portraits of slightly jaded or bitter married couples, but it is less usual to come across an established married couple who are still strongly moved by their mental and sensual love for each other. Maxwell’s writing is always beautiful on the sentence level, often subtly weaving in and out of metaphor in a way I find immensely satisfying.

Somebody who matches him, the curves and hollows of her nature fitting into all the curves and hollows of his nature as, in bed, her straight back and soft thighs fit inside the curve of his breast and belly and hips and bent legs. Somebody who looks enough like him that they are mistaken occasionally for brother and sister, and who keeps him warm at night, taking the place of the doll that he used to sleep with his arm around: Barbara Scully. Barbara S Rhodes, when she writes a check.

What helps the couple feel particularly vivid, though, is Maxwell’s humour. He is excellent at capturing a familiar sort of flippancy between two people who love each other – for instance, when Harold is manfully reading aloud from a history book, Barbara interrupts him with “Couldn’t you just read it to yourself and tell me about it afterward?” These lighter scenes were among my favourite, and leavened a novel that could have felt a bit too pensive without them.

They don’t spend the whole time in the chateau. Over their months in the country, they travel out to different cities, and Maxwell details their activities – the privations of post-war life, the nostalgia about a trip from Barbara’s childhood, detailed scenes of their attempts to get to grips with the value of things, availability of food, correct manners etc. Along the way, they can’t truly connect with the French people they meet – always, they are coming up against invisible walls. They aren’t rejected, and many people are amiable, but nor are they embraced.

Perhaps the most moving relationship is with a couple they meet. Harold thinks Eugene has the possibility to be a dear friend…

Eugene began to sing quietly, under his breath, and Harold rode a little closer to the other bicycle, listening. It was not an old song, judging by the words, but in the tune there was a slight echo of the thing that had moved him so, that day in Blois. When Eugene finished, Harold said: “What’s the name of the song you were singing?”

“It’s just a song,” Eugene said, with his his eyes on the road, and pure, glittering, personal dislike emanating from him like an aura.

The painful discovery that someone you like very much does not like you is one of the innumerable tricks the vaudeville magician has up his sleeve. Think of a card, any card: now you see it, now you don’t…

What a true tragedy, cutting more sharply than many more overblown tragedies. How relatable, how piercing. And how quintessentially Maxwell to slide effortlessly from a specific moment to a general truth, done with an elegance that really feels like he is seeing straight through his characters into the heart of the human condition. Perhaps more difficultly, he does the same for happiness:

They should never have left Beaulieu, but they did; after ten days, he went and got bus tickets, and she packed their suitcases, and he went downstairs and paid the bill, and early the next morning they stood in the road, waiting for the bus to Marseilles. It was impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.

What a beautiful paragraph. I’ve highlighted some of the disjoints in the characters’ experience – between what they hoped and what they experienced, between friendships and unexpected emnities – but there is also so much beauty, life and love in this novel. Maxwell is too subtle a writer to weigh the scales entirely on one side.

The Chateau is quite a long novel, and feels longer. As I said at the beginning, it luxuriates in its slowness. In the wrong mood, I was a little bored and wanted more action, less reflection. But in the right mood – and I was in the right mood almost the whole time I was reading it – I absolutely adored the novel. His exceptional writing, his understanding of people, and his generosity in developing characters make The Chateau something special.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

1961 Club: your reviews!

StuckinaBook All 49 Comments

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

The 1961 Club has started! Karen and I are asking everyone to read and review books published in 1961 – share your links below, or put your review in the comments.

Marry in Haste by Joan Aiken Hodge
Staircase Wit

The Body in the Dumb River by George Bellairs
Fanda Classiclit
My Reader’s Block

Rose Under Glass by Elizabeth Berridge
Stuck in a Book

The Streetwalker by Luciano Bianciardi
Brona’s Books

War Isn’t Wonderful by Ursula Bloom
Stuck in a Book

The Mystery of Banshee Towers by Enid Blyton
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

A Stranger at Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston
Calmgrove Books

One Hand Clapping by Anthony Burgess
Somewhere Boy

The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

What is History? by E.H. Carr
Brona’s Books

Daughters-in-Law by Henry Cecil
Literary Potpourri

Abbie and Arthur by Dane Chandos
Stuck in a Book

Just Another Sucker by James Hadley Chase
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

A Lotus for Miss Quon by James Hadley Chase
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Emily’s Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary
Staircase Wit

The Mighty and Their Fall by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Somewhere Boy
Stuck in a Book

The Scene of the Crime by John Creasey
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Heat Wave in Berlin by Dymphna Cusack
ANZ Lit Lovers

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Literary Potpourri
Calmgrove Books

Provincial Daughter by R.M. Dashwood
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson
JacquiWine’s Journal
Just Reading A Book
David’s Book World

The Witch of the Low Tide by John Dickson Carr
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame
Stuck in a Book

Pen to Paper by Pamela Frankau
Stuck in a Book

Seven Lean Years by Celia Fremlin
Cross Examining Crime
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Kaddish and other poems by Allen Ginsberg
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Voices in the Evening by Natalia Ginzburg
Book Around the Corner

Marnie by Winston Graham
AnnaBookBel

My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn
Somewhere Boy

Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff
Stuck in a Book

The Lime Twig by John Hawkes
Typings

A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer
She Reads Novels
Wicked Witch’s Blog

Little Bear’s Visit by Else Holmelund Minarik
Calmgrove Books

Sunlight on a Broken Column by Attia Hosain
What? Me Read?

Household Ghosts by James Kennaway
Somewhere Boy

Pull My Daisy by Jack Kerouac
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Life and Love in the Henhouse by Irena Krzywicka
This Reading Life

The Siren by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Brona’s Brooks

Call for the Dead by John Le Carré
Words and Peace
Books Please

Quaestrio de Cantauris by Primo Levi
Brona’s Books

The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz
What? Me Read?
Winston’s Dad

Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seichō Matsumoto
JacquiWine’s Journal

Conscience by Ana María Matute
Brona’s Books

The Chateau by William Maxwell
Stuck in a Book

Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers
746 Books
1st Reading

Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
Somewhere Boy

Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat
Fanda Classiclit

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
Calmgrove Books
Janet – LoveBooks, ReadBooks
Adventures in reading, running and working from home

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Buried in Print

The Methods of Sergeant Cluff by Gil North
Stuck in a Book
My Reader’s Block

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
Rose Reads Novels

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
746 Books

Owls and Satyrs by David Pryce-Jones
Stuck in a Book

No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym
The Middle Shelf

Heaven Has No Favorites by Erich Maria Remarque
Book Around The Corner

The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
1st Reading

The Sneetches by Dr Seuss
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Maigret and the Idle Burglar by Georges Simenon
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
Literary Potpourri

Betty by Georges Simenon
Winston’s Dad

Epidemic by Frank G. Slaughter
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Ballad of the Running Man by Shelley Smith
A Hot Cup of Pleasure

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
What? Me Read?
She Reads Novels
Reading Matters

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
Words and Peace

Bel Lamington by D. E. Stevenson
Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Hopewell’s Public Library of Life

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart
Staircase Wit
Fanda Classiclit

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
Volatile Rune

I Was Going Anyway by Robert Switzer
The Dusty Bookcase

Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichirō Tanizaki
Winston’s Dad

In A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor
Somewhere Boy
Stuck in a Book

Treasure of Hemlock Mountain by Virginia Frances Boight
My Reader’s Block

The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries
Typings
Somewhere Boy

The Girl in the Cellar by Patricia Wentworth
Staircase Wit

A Grave Undertaking by Lionel White
Words and Peace

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends
Bookish Beck
What? Me Read?

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 4 Comments

Hello all! I’m back from my blogging break, with fresh enthusiasm for it. And let’s kick off with a weekend miscellany – which is really just to remind you that the 1961 Club kicks off on Monday! Grab any book, in any language, format etc, first published in 1961 – and together we’ll read and review as many as we can. Can’t wait.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

Alongside that, here is your book, blog post, and link…

1.) The link – I’ve just finished my final Muriel Spark novel, so it’s far too late for me to read an article by James Bailey called ‘Where to start with Muriel Spark‘, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Like A Cat Loves A Bird cover, showing Muriel Spark holding a black cat

2.) The book – talking of which, James Bailey has just published a new biography of Muriel Spark: Like A Cat Loves A Bird. I’m excited to read it at some point, and we do seem to be in a golden era of new Spark biogs (i.e. there is also Electric Spark by Frances Wilson).

3.) The blog post – I’m delighted to learn that Nicholas Royle has written another book about his bibliophilia – Finders, Keepers – and Karen’s review will make you as keen as I am to read it.

#148: Is There A Right Time To Read A Book? and The Dutch House vs The Party

StuckinaBook Tea or Books? , , 4 Comments

Ann Patchett, Tessa Hadley, and finding the right time to read a book – welcome to episode 149!

In the first half, we answer the question: is there a right time for each particular book? In the second half, we compare Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House and Tessa Hadley’s The Party.

You can support the podcast at Patreon – where you’ll also get access to the exclusive new series ‘5 Books’, where I ask different people about the last book they finished, the book they’re currently reading, the next book they want to read, the last book they bought and the last book they were given

And, of course, do get in touch at teaorbooks@gmail.com with any questions or comments!

The books and authors we mentioned in this episode are:

Honourable Estates by Vera Brittain
Deviants by Santanu Bhattacharya
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence
Richmal Crompton
E.V. Lucas
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Sweet Valley High by Francine Pascal
The Pooh Perplex by Frederick Crews
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Douglas Bruton
The Bachelors by Muriel Spark
Symposium by Muriel Spark

A little blogging break

StuckinaBook All 6 Comments

You may or may not have noticed how little I’ve been posting this year – I’ve always blogged as little or as much as I wanted to, and for some reason I haven’t felt the urge as much in the past few months. And so I’m going to go on a proper blog break (rather than the informal one that I’m already seemingly on!) and I’ll be back for the 1961 Club in April. You’ll also see me pop up with Tea or Books? episodes too, of course.

See you in April – as a reminder…

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.