The Suburban Young Man – E.M. Delafield

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Can we talk about how  pleasingly this bookmark goes?

I started reading The Suburban Young Man (1928) when Tanya was giving a paper on it at a conference we both attended – that link will take you to her great review of it, which includes interesting research into Delafield’s writing of the novel.  Well, I didn’t manage to finish it then, and it went back on the shelf for 18 months or so… and recently I picked it up and swiftly read through to the end.

It’s definitely not one of EMD’s best books, but it’s EMD – so it’s still definitely worth a read.

The main characters are aristocratic Antoinette and the eponymous young man – Peter – who is married to the saintly housewife Hope.  They begin an extramarital affair which is entirely a meeting of minds – Delafield, as with her better-known The Way Things Are, never takes things as far as the bedroom door, let alone further.

Much of the novel is taken up Antoinette and Peter telling each other how well they are suited, even though their backgrounds are so different.  One of the assumptions the novelist makes (and all the characters make) is that the suburbs – here represented by ‘Richford’ – are entirely beyond the pale, and culturally mired in the commonplace.  That view is essential to many interwar novels, but it falls rather flat for the modern reader.  Still flatter, for this modern reader, is all the earnest discussion of romance.  Delafield is at her weakest when she tries to be earnest – she is so, so much better at lifting the veil on self-delusion, or the comedy of everyday life, and not with paragraphs like this:

He was unable now to view himself as disloyal to his wife with any sense of conviction, and this not because technically he had remained faithful to her.  Merely he could not feel that he had taken from Hope anything that she had ever possessed, or would ever have wished to possess.  They had married one another neither by reason of passion nor from any strong sense of affinity, and the liking and admiration that he felt for many aspects of her personality had increased, rather than diminished, of late; nor did he think that she liked him less.
Hope is an absurdly tolerant character, who invites Antoinette to tea and has rational discussions about the possibility of her husband running off.  Their marriage is pretty emotionless, but she is almost violently rational, and it’s not terribly convincing.  More interesting (to me) are the scenes of Antoinette as a worker in an office, and discussions of what it was like for the newly-poor(ish) upper-classes to need employment.

Tanya wasn’t a fan of Norah (Peter’s sister-in-law) but I have to say that, along with Antoinette’s vague but surprisingly wise mother, Norah was my favourite character.  Mostly because it gave a chance for Delafield to show her claws, which I delight in.  Here’s a couple of examples.

Norah burst out laughing, as she invariably did at any opprobrious epithet, however applied.

Norah made a grimace that might have suggested a spoilt child in a prettier woman.
So, although I wasn’t hugely impressed when I put it back on the shelf in 2012, I rushed through the second half in 2014. Delafield’s writing is dependably engaging, and I certainly enjoyed reading The Suburban Young Man. But I’ve now read 23 books by Delafield, and this one is probably towards the lower end of the list, and I wouldn’t avidly encourage you to seek out the (extremely scarce) copies of this one.

Since Delafield came out of copyright recently, I’m hoping that more of her books will be reprinted – and not just endless copies of the (admittedly exceptionally good) Provincial Lady series.  But I shan’t shed too many tears if The Suburban Young Man is left to languish a bit longer.

Literary T-shirts

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I got an email the other day asking if I’d like to help make literature fashionable – and, being the fashionable chap I doubtless am, I said yes.

It turns out that The Affair make great book-themed T-shirts, and offered to send me a sample.  How lovely, thought I, and the other day my T-shirt arrived.  I have to admit that it probably isn’t ‘inspired by my favourite books’ (as their tagline goes) because I’ve never heard of Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea, but I do love the T-shirt.  The fabric quality is amazing, such a nice light cotton, and the design is great.  Oh, and they’re sweatshop-free, which is a brilliant bonus.

This is very much not what I look like.

For a full list of the T-shirts they make (which I think are only for men, but I could be wrong) see here.  There are some great books represented – Picture of Dorian Gray, Macbeth, Animal Farm etc. – and they’d make great gifts for the man in your life (and, if you’re a man, that man could be you.)

Thanks, The Affair, I love my tee!

So… I gave up on Lolita

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I usually wade in strongly on the ‘literary quality is the most important thing’ side of debates.  I think of myself as putting the writer’s ability first, and that age-old argument of not liking books if they have dislikeable characters has never made any sense to me.  “I’m above such things,” thought I, smugly, dusting my doctorate and twirling my imaginary moustache.

But, dear reader, it turns out I’m nothing like as objective and scholarly as I liked to believe.  Because I gave up on p.16 of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov because it was – and stop me if I’m blinding you with my critical vocabulary – too icky.

Apparently I just can’t stomach a man fantasising about nine year old girls.  I know that Nabokov isn’t advocating paedophilia (well, I assume he wasn’t), and I know that Lolita is well-recognised as a classic.  The writing was good (although I have to say I wasn’t quite as bowled over by it as some people said I’d be) but I couldn’t get past that.

I don’t know why I’m feeling quite so conflicted about my stumbling block. The argument I’ve put to myself is that I’m fine with reading murder mysteries, so why can’t I read Lolita – but then I remembered that I’m incapable of reading anything gory or violent, so… statutory rape and a character fantasising about it is also in that category, it seems.

This is not a ‘burn the books’ situation – I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that.  I actually think it probably makes me less of a reader to have this inability.  But I would be intrigued to know your opinions on the matter… and, more than that, if there are other Nabokov novels I should read instead!  I’ve only read Mary so far, so plenty to try….

Song for a Sunday

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Well, last Sunday I posted a new track from an artist who hasn’t even released an album yet (although she has found fame on the X Factor) and nobody commented, so I thought I’d try something different this week ;)

It’s rare that I like old male bands (new female singer-songwriters being my bag) but I do like the Eagles, and I love Desperado… and I suspect you do too.  Indulge.

The Teleportation Accident – Ned Beauman

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Can we be superficial for a moment?  This cover is amazing.  I love it so much.  I’ve had a hunt through the paperback to try to work out who designed it, and failed, but kudos to him or her.

I read Ned Beauman’s first novel (Boxer, Beetle) shortly before meeting him at a Sceptre party – thanks Sceptre for sending me this one too! – and was very pleasantly surprised.  I don’t think there is any way in which I could have been sold a book about boxing, beetles, and Nazis which would have made me think I might like it – but it was brilliant, energetically and stylishly written, and utterly captivating.  I was even lucky enough to interview him about it.  So, when The Teleportation Accident (2012) came out and got longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, I was naturally rather keen to read it… and lax enough that I’ve only just finished it.  Writing about a novel that’s a couple of years ago can feel more dated than writing about one from a hundred years ago, so I hope you will forgive the indulgence.

The Teleportation Accident is one of those novels which demands either a shortish review or an enormous one.  I can simply enthuse about Beauman’s extraordinary imagination and scope, or I can begin to try and explain how that is manifested… and the latter would end up taking thousands of words.  There is just so much in the novel; it’s a real tour de force.  Boxer, Beetle showed that Beauman could meld together disparate and surreal elements into a coherent and entertaining narrative – The Teleportation Accident does more of the same.

Even the title itself refers to various layers.  A 17th-century Parisian set designed, Adriano Lavicini, destroys a theatre and kills dozens after his teleportation device tears apart a theatre.  A scientist in 1930s America tries to replicate the device.  And the main character of the novel – a German called Egon Loeser, whose main preoccupation is how seldom he has sex – is fascinated with Lavicini.

Sound complicated?  I haven’t even started on the people pretending to attach monkey glands to people’s necks for health reasons, the macabre serial killer, the man suffering from an extreme form of agnosia, the film director with a secret, and the curiously named (but very beautiful) Adele Hitler…

How does Beauman make it all work?  I don’t know, but he does.  After an opening few paragraphs which make a solid attempt at Kundera-esque postmodern semiotics, he settles down into a prose style which is equal parts verve and pizazz.  I sometimes wondered (with both novels) if he folded up bits of paper with surreal things on them, pulled some out of a hat, and dared himself to write a novel joining them all up.  Well, he wins the dare.  Somehow the tone remains consistent throughout – I think it is that unchanging sense of style, as well as the very grounded, fairly carnal preoccupations of Loeser – which allow a mad box of novelistic tricks to succeed as a single entity.

It also helps that Beauman seems to be having a lot of fun (although I’m sure it was also a lot of hard work).  Here’s a paragraph I jotted down – I’m not a fan of sci-fi, but I loved the way he wrote about teleportation:

The point is, you can’t just delete the subject in one place and create a copy in another.  If you did that to a human being, all you’d be doing is murdering someone and replacing them with a clone a few minutes old.  That way, no one who believed in a soul – like my parents, for instance – would ever be willing to set foot in a teleportation device.  So instead you have to move the object itself, really move it.  But it can’t move through the intervening space.  It has to be in one place, and then, snap!  Suddenly in another.  It has to change its position all at once.  Well, what’s position, anyway?  It’s not a function of space.  There’s no more such a thing as space than there’s such a thing as the ether.  Space is just objects, and position is a function of those objects.  So if you can – the Professor always warns me against the Pathetic Fallacy, but it’s so hard to avoid sometimes – if you can make an object forget its old position, and then persuade it of its new position, then that’s teleportation.  But how do you do that?  
Ultimately, teleportation is a hook to hang the novel on.  I found I didn’t much care whether or not the machine (indeed, the various machines) actually worked.  I wasn’t even hugely invested in what happened to Loeser – I was invested in the zany rollercoaster on which the novel took me.  Even events which, in the hands of a less talented writer, would be sordid seemed to me simply surreal and part of the vivid, myriad pattern of The Teleportation Accident.

Although he is Nicola Beauman’s son, his novels could scarcely be more different from those published by Persephone – and yet I love both.  I am ultimately very attracted to a novelist who has a vast imagination, and (crucially) knows how to control it and use it very wisely.  Beauman is that novelist.

Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill

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I’m over at Vulpes Libris at the moment, with a review of Somewhere Towards the End (2008) by Diana Athill.  It does fit in my new century, but I actually finished it at the end of 2013.  I did like a lot of it, but struggled with some of it, and my review is mostly about what I struggled with… which I found difficult to explore and express properly, but valued trying!  Head over and read it, if you so wish, here.

Re-reading

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I’ve just finished re-reading The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson for my book group, and thus it will be filling my 1982 slot in A Century of Books, but I didn’t want to repeat myself by re-reviewing it since, like Mr. Darcy, my affections and wishes are unchanged – so, if you would like to, go and see why I thought The True Deceiver was so wonderful back in 2009.  In short – the novel is fascinating for giving an insight into Jansson’s feelings about writing for children, the relationship between two very different women is slightly sinister but also poignant, and the writing is (as ever with Jansson) beautiful and sparse.  If you’ve not read Jansson before, go grab this, it’s wonderful.

But I wanted to talk about re-reading instead – and how that changes the way we feel about the books around us.

I’m always fascinated by how a bookcase (or ten) of books is not a neutral entity to their owner.  To anybody looking into my bedroom, they are simply bookcases of books.  To me, each spine is either unknown territory – exciting, but mysterious and vague – or a place I have already wandered.  Isn’t it funny how a (say) off-white spine can go from being something about which we know almost nothing, maybe just the lead character’s name and the genre, and (after having read it) the sight of it is a trigger for all sorts of memories and emotions.

Amongst those tried-and-known books on my shelves, there are a select few which don’t just hold memories but which hold definite promise.  That’s different (of course) from the promise suggested by a recommendation, or even by an unread by a much-loved author.  They are, instead, the books that I know I can return to time and again, and know precisely what emotions they will conjure; how wonderful and stimulating the writing will be; how happy (or moved, or admiring, or amused) the words will make me.

Tove Jansson’s beautiful books are among that number.  So is The Diary of a Provincial Lady, the novels of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf… basically anything in my 50 Books list.  They are not so much books to be re-read, but experiences to be re-captured – and to be built upon.

Which brings me to my question.  This is all well and good in theory – and certainly worked with The True Deceiver, about which I felt exactly the same both times around – but there are some books which disappoint when re-read.  There are others which get much better – but, since I rarely re-read a book I was lukewarm about the first time around, I seldom discover these.

Over to you for this bit – which book was the most disappointing re-read?  And which the most surprisingly rewarding?

My answers, respectively, as Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey and One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes.  The first went from being a book I loved abundantly to one I liked a lot, but felt oddly unexcited about; the latter (as you can see in my review) took the exact opposite trajectory.  Since I still rather like Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, you can see that I’ve never had a hugely disappointing re-reading experience… those promising spines have kept their promise.  You?