2010s

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

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Sometimes, reading a book that everyone was reading a few years ago can make you feel more behind the times than reading something from a century ago. I knew about The Dutch House (2019) by Ann Patchett, of course, since it won any number of awards and appeared in lots of best-of lists – but I didn’t really know any details, and for some reason it hadn’t appealed. Thank goodness for book group selecting it. Now that I’ve read it, I can certainly see what all the fuss is about.

The first time our father brought Andrea to the Dutch House, Sandy, our housekeeper, came to my sister’s room and told us to come downstairs. “Your father has a friend he wants you to meet,” she said.

“Is it a work friend?” Maeve asked. She was older and so had a more complex understanding of friendship.

Sandy considered the question. “I’d say not. Where’s your brother?”

That’s how The Dutch House opens, and it is our introduction to the family unit living in the house in question. The narrator is Danny, Maeve’s brother, and he is hiding behind the drapes, eavesdropping. The house itself is hard to grasp. I’ve often mentioned that I don’t have a ‘mind’s eye’ for picturing visual descriptions, so I always struggle with that sort of thing, but I struggled here to even have a sense of its size. There are a handful of small bedrooms – but a ballroom on the third floor. It was built for a Dutch family with ornate mouldings and lavish features, but is clearly quite modern and on a street soon crowded with other buildings and a short driveway. I suppose almost all neighbourhoods in America are modern to British eyes.

To go back to that opening, Andrea will eventually be their new stepmother – an unwelcome addition to the household, who seems to make no effort with her boyfriend’s children and see them as an affront on her new position and home. She is young and beautiful, and perhaps that is why Danny and Maeve’s father has chosen to marry her. Danny, the narrator is looking back from several decades in the future, merging his eight-year-old experience with the understanding of a middle-aged man, but in neither iteration is he particularly good at recognising the motivations of others. It often doesn’t seem to cross his mind. Their mother has disappeared – Danny can scarcely remember her – and none of their questions about her whereabouts are satisfactorily answered. They assume she is dead, but if she is alive then her deliberate absence is a kind of death to them.

Much of the first section of the novel is about the unspoken war between Andrea and Danny/Maeve. It is only after two years of Andrea being a regular visitor to the house that they discover she has two daughters of her own, younger than they are.

Nearly two years into her irregular tenure, Andrea walked in the house one Saturday afternoon with two small girls. Say what you will for Andrea, she had a knack for making the impossible seem natural. I wasn’t clear about whether it was only Maeve and I who were meeting her daughters for the first time, or if the existence of Norma and Bright Smith was news to our father as well. No, he must have known. The very fact that he didn’t look at them meant they were already familiar.

This passage is an excellent example of what Patchett is doing so cleverly throughout the novel. As well as some incisive turns of phrase – ‘a knack for making the impossible seem natural’ – it shows how she interweaves Danny’s different perspectives across time. At the forefront is the 10-year-old who thinks his father might not have known about his potential stepdaughters – followed by the older man realising how absurd this remembered confusion is – then followed, again, with a striking memory that supports his more recent understanding of the situation. Patchett is a subtle, sharp writer, and it is extraordinary how she manages to keep the sensibilities of young and old on the page at the same time. All tied together with Danny’s lack of self-awareness. We gradually realise, as the novel continues, how little he truly understands of almost anybody else in his life – regardless of whether he cherishes them or despises them. His flaws are so unspoken that it takes a while – it took me a while, at least – to recognise that is an unreliable narrator. Not because he lies, but because there is so much he doesn’t know, often without realising. (Incidentally, it felt like such a female voice – particularly in the opening chapters, where I had to keep reminding myself that it was a brother, not a sister, narrating. I don’t know why I kept thinking it was a girl speaking, but others at book group agreed.)

I started the novel thinking that it was fine – relatively well-written, ordinary enough. Somewhere along the way I was totally beguiled. Without noticing quite when, I was immersed and filled with admiration. This is the real deal.

Through Danny’s eyes, we see him and his sister grow older. Maeve is away at college – during which, Andrea moves her things into the attic bedroom. Losing her beloved windowseat, and doing so uncomplainingly, is one of the great wounding moments of literature. It reminded me of Jo March’s stories being burned, though Maeve’s response is certainly much more subdued.

Alongside this, Danny is figuring out his future. His father is a property tycoon, buying and selling commercial and residential buildings, and this is the world that Danny longs to join. Maeve clearly has a brilliance with figures, but it is not expected that she shall do significant further education or join the family business. I never worked out the timeline of the novel, but we must be somewhere around the mid-century, or a bit later.

I don’t want to spoil any further events in the novel, but it covers decades of the brother’s and sister’s lives. Tragedy and the selfish behaviour of others shapes the direction of their lives – but their own pettiness and hubris play their parts too. Danny’s marriage and children are a significant part of the latter stages of The Dutch House, but there is one true romance at the heart of the book. ‘Romance’ is probably the wrong word, but I mean it in a sexless way: Maeve is always the focus of Danny’s attention and care. She is the most interesting character in the novel because she is the most interesting character in Danny’s life. He never states it outright, but her wisdom, kindness, and determination are sacred to him.

Which is not to say they never argue. Arguing is their main form of communication. Patchett writes an adult sibling relationship so well in The Dutch House – the sort of relationship that is central to many people’s lives, but seldom addressed in fiction. There is a depth of dependence and trust between them, and a bond that cannot be equalled in any other relationship. It is beautiful, even when it is frustrating and occasionally unhealthy. She captures the sibling dynamic so perfectly in their quippy dialogue, which darts between openness and occasional secrecy. The depth of their care for each other means that some things are kept hidden, for the perceived benefit of the other. And, again, we gradually realise that there is a lot about Maeve that Danny has never truly understood.

I kept thinking that Maeve would be a better title for the novel. She is the narrator’s first and last consideration, even his obsession. She has played sister, father, mother, friend, mentor, and even the cover is a specially commissioned portrait that appears in the novel. But calling it The Dutch House is clever: it keeps the home in our thoughts, even when the narrative moves far from it. It gives the reader an expectancy that the house will return. The legacy of their upbringing is this strange, almost fantastical, home casts a long shadow over their lives. And for reasons they never fully understand, in their 20s and 30s they often return to the house – not to go inside, but to sit in a car outside, smoking and talking.

“This isn’t a stakeout. It’s not like we’re here all the time. We drop by every couple of months for fifteen minutes.”

“It’s more than fifteen minutes,” I said, and it might well have been more than every couple of months.

There is a sharp line later in the book, where Danny realises he is nostalgic not for their childhood, but for the times in the car outside their childhood home. Not for memory, but for memory of memory – filtered through his sister and their conversations.

There is so much in The Dutch House. Whole careers, marriages, twists that wouldn’t be out of place in a murder mystery, but which are played with an almost subdued thoughtfulness. Patchett reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver, or perhaps Carol Shields. Writers who are not reinventing the novel form or taking it into new, shocking directions – but are taking a traditional novel, focusing on characters and their development, and simply doing it with exceptional skill. She elevates the genre. That is Patchett’s real brilliance: to make her creations live so vitally and vividly that it feels important to witness their world.

I hope this doesn’t sound over the top, but few novels convey so successfully how monumental it is simply to live a life.

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma

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Every now and then, I’ll know it’s time to pick a book from my teetering pile of books about reading. I mean this literally, except there is not one pile: there are three. They stand about three feet tall, behind the door into my living room, as there simply isn’t space for them anywhere else – and they are not in any order, so that read and unread books, old and new, a scattergun of unalphabetised authors sit there.

The most recent choice was The Reading Promise (2011) by Alice Ozma, which my friend Malie gave me for my birthday last year. The subtitle tells you what is going on: ‘3,218 nights of reading with my father’.

Opinions differ, within the book, about how the promise started. But it seems to have started on a train. Alice’s dad – Jim – regularly read to Alice at night and now, in 1998, when Alice was in third grade (the internet tells me this is aged eight or nine) they decided to make this casual habit into something official. They started The Streak. Now, their opinions differ on whether they initially set out to do a hundred days or a thousand – one remembers the hundred-day streak ending with a commitment to add another 900 days, while the other thinks it was a thousand at the outset – but the commitment was made.

When I started reading Ozma’s book, I thought it might feature a lot of the books they discussed. And they are in there, of course. But the specifics are somewhat incidental to what is really a memoir of a father/daughter relationship – one that became all the more important after Ozma’s parents divorced. Their shared love of reading managed to get past the awkward teenage period, and they were able to put aside temporary feuds to ensure they had at least a few minutes of reading every night – though Ozma movingly remembers the final time that she lay in the crook of her dad’s arm as he read. And even that was an unusual concession to the significance of the nightly ritual: Ozma builds up a picture of a kind, intelligent, funny and very loving man, but he is not the warm, huggy man you might be picturing from the premise.

My dad is not an affectionate man. As a librarian, he told his students not to touch him, warning them that his skin was poisonous. Kindergarteners seemed to accept this as fact, but the older students often wondered why they couldn’t just give their favourite teacher a hug. He does not like to be touched, and he does not want to touch other people. After school concerts or award ceremonies, I saw other parents hug and sometimes even kiss their children. My father considered it a bold and almost over-the-top display to stick one finger in my hair and scrtach my scalp for a moment with his cracked fingernail, like he was helping me get an itch I just couldn’t reach. If the event called for such a grand gesture, he would do it quickly and then back away several feet. 

The portrait of Jim is necessarily very subjective, and I wasn’t always sure that I would like him were I to meet him, but I loved reading the evolving relationship of father and daughter (with other members of the family much more peripheral). Reading is more of a thread through the tapestry than the main content – there is, for instance, no complete list of books read, just some pages of the ones they remember, ranging from childhood classics to presidential biographies, via Dickens, Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many, many books I haven’t heard of.

And because the reading is really a portal to their relationship, there are lots of chapters about totally unrelated things. There is a clarion call against the American education system for its devaluing of reading. There are the various relationships her father has after divorce, and what an extending, evolving family feels like. The most fascinating tangent is where Ozma writes about her vivid fear of JFK. Even when she learns he is dead, the fear doesn’t abate: she is terrified that his body (still, somehow, evil and out to get her) is in her bedroom. Holding a book he once loved leaves her scrubbing her hands like Lady Macbeth. The terror is so unusual that a novelist might be wary of using it, but Ozma describes it with a heady recollection of the fear, as well as self-awareness about how unrelatable it is, at least as a specific phobia. It’s not what I expected in a memoir about reading, but these sorts of details and anecdotes help set The Reading Promise apart from any book-about-books that ends up retreading familiar ground.

Why did The Streak end? There isn’t a sad story here: it simply ended because Ozma went away to college. And this book is really a tribute to what a beautiful thing it was. An obsessive, perhaps peculiar version of many father/daughter relationships – but lovely to read a memoir of resilient love, and a generational love of reading that persisted long beyond the close of the book. Here are the final words of The Reading Promise (which, in case it isn’t clear, is a book I loved reading):

We called it The Reading Streak, but it was really more of a promise. A promise to each other, a promise to ourselves. A promise to always be there and to never give up. It was a promise of hope in hopeless times. It was a promise of comfort when things got uncomfortable. And we kept our promise to each other.

But more than that, it was a promise to the world: a promise to remember the power of the printed word, to take time to cherish it, to protect it at all costs. He promised to explain, to anyone and everyone he meets, the life-changing ability literature can have. He promised to fight for it. So that’s what he’s doing.

Thirteen years ago, my father made the reading promise to me. He kept his word.

A couple of underwhelming #ABookADayInMay choices – Days 28 + 29

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Coming towards the end of A Book A Day In May, I’ve read a couple of books that weren’t particularly bad, but left me pretty underwhelmed. So let’s race through them.

One Writer's Beginnings: Amazon.co.uk: Welty, Eudora: 9781982152109: Books

One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) by Eudora Welty

I’ve only read two of Eudora Welty’s novels – The Optimist’s Daughter, which I thought was brilliant, and Delta Wedding, which I didn’t. Years and years ago I started One Writer’s Beginnings but somehow never finished it – and, considering it’s 102 pages, I should have taken that as a red flag. Well, I started again and now I’ve read it, but it felt very meh.

One Writer’s Beginnings comes from three lectures that Welty gave at Harvard, and I wonder what they made of them there. Really, this is my fault though. I always find the childhood sections of autobiographies the least interesting sections – and One Writer’s Beginnings told me in the title that that’s what it would be. Welty’s three chapters are basically childhood anecdotes and family folklore, and only right at the end do we get anything hinting at her writing career (beyond the odd mention here and there, which presumably reminded Harvard that they’d invited her as a Pulitzer prizewinning author, rather than someone with a diverting childhood).

There’s nothing wrong with her stories, and some of the things her family experienced were heartrending (there is a poignant section where she accidentally learns about the brother who died, and even more poignant that she adds that her parents never mentioned him again). But I found that her novelist’s craft rather deserted her. Even anecdotes that should be interesting in fundamentals come across as curiously uninteresting. I recognise that I’ve not detailed what many of them are, and that’s because I’ve already forgotten almost all of them. I don’t know why One Writer’s Beginnings was so bland to me, but it was. Your mileage may vary.

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Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015) by Becky Albertalli

I listened to this young adult novel, having previously watched the film – adaptated under the more crowdpleasing title Love, Simon. It’s about a gay teenager (Simon) who has been emailing another gay teenager – both of them using pseudonyms. The novel is about this e-friendship, wondering who ‘Blue’ might be, and the wider group of Simon’s friends and family.

I’d enjoyed the film, but found the book a bit slow by comparison. I didn’t much care about any of Simon’s friends, and the subplots involving them were a bit of a slog. The book picked up towards the end – and, thank you fading memory, I had misremembered the identity of ‘Blue’ – so that revelation came as a surprise the second time around. I guess either I’m too old for this sort of book, or the makers of the film turned it into something a bit zippier. (As a sidenote, and I’ve found this a few times, listening to an audiobook with lots of emails in it is a mistake, cos you can skim over the email address / time stamp / subject line when you’re reading it, and it is tedious to hear all these read out over and over again in an audiobook.)

So, not the best couple of days, so let’s be optimistic for finishing off May well with my next two choices.

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick – #ABookADayInMay Day 7

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I’m only buying 24 books this year, and so naturally I’m choosing them carefully. I knew I had to have The Odd Woman and the City (2015) by Vivian Gornick when Jacqui wrote a brilliant review in January (and it certainly didn’t hurt that it had been republished by Daunt Books, who have impeccable taste). Now I’ve read it, and Jacqui didn’t put me wrong – it’s brilliant.

The Odd Woman and the City has the subtitle ‘a memoir’, but it’s only a memoir in the loose sense that it’s non-fiction and in the first person. Don’t come here expecting to have anything you might traditionally expect in a memoir. Anything we learn about Gornick is picked up almost by accident, in amidst the things that she thinks are more important – or perhaps I should say, she recognises that things like friendship, city life, and literary appreciation are more significant markers of a person’s life than date of birth, list of publications etc. etc.

The Odd Woman and the City isn’t told in fragments in the way that Blue Postcards was – it feels more linear than that – but it is still built up impressionistically, weaving between reflections on friendship with a man she loves but brings out her negative side, to comments overheard as she walks through New York, to analyses of books she has loved from Middlemarch to Isabel Bolton to George Gissing’s The Odd Women that inspires Gornick’s title. Her main subjects are right there in the title: herself, and New York.

I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to ­arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center of the world and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby. 

At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.

I have never been to New York, and I don’t particularly want to. I am emphatically not a city person and I never intend to live in one again (my 13 years in a city as small as Oxford were proof that I wasn’t built for city living). Gornick even commits the cardinal sin of saying that the Bronx is ‘like a village’, which is the sort of thing people say about areas of cities if they have never lived in a village. And yet I loved reading about Gornick’s thoughts on city life – the people she knows, the people she overlaps with, the communities that have battled through modernity and the ones that have been lost. She scatters in amusing or unusual New York moments in between longer self-examinations, as though she is walking through the city, lost in contemplation, and occasionally interrupted by something significant in front of her.

On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need –’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’

She is excellent at immersing us in different worlds, whether that is particular streets or particular milieus. Some are more sustained – towards the end of the book there is a poignant recollection of seeing a friend delivering a Samuel Beckett monologue after having been severely invalided by a stroke. Some are only in passing, but Gornick is brilliant are using all of the elements to build up a picture of her life. Her sense of rhythm and pace – whether of sentences, paragraphs, or whole sections – is exhilirating.

She is remorseless is self-examination – though I did enjoy the contradiction of nearby sentences that ‘It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are’ and ‘No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am’. What an irony – to create a memoir while saying that she does not understand herself, and that you shouldn’t believe her even if she said she did. But somehow both those statements get to the heart of what The Odd Woman and the City is: more an exploration of the questions you could ask about your life, your friendships, your connections, your city, your home – and less about any concrete conclusions. Gornick resists writing the traditional, solid memoir on firm foundations, and the result is excellent. The book is somehow sturdy in its fluidity.

In conclusion, Jacqui was right, of course. This book is a marvel.

Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson

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As you may know, if you’ve been here for a while, my doctoral thesis looked at fantastic novels – specifically those aimed at a middlebrow audience, published between the World Wars. By ‘fantastic’, I mean that they are set in this world, but with an element of fantasy in them. So not fantasy authors like Tolkien, who create entirely new worlds. Rather, we are in a recognisable England – or wherever – and a lady turns into a fox. A woman accidentally conjures her imaginary childhood best friend to life. A staircase moves around a house, and people forget what’s happened in the room at the top of it whenever they leave.

It’s still my favourite genre – but how do you find it? They’re not exactly grouped together in the bookshop. So I’m always on the lookout, and I was drawn to Nothing To See Here (2019) by Kevin Wilson as soon as I heard the premise: it’s about twin children who spontaneously combust. Not just once – they do it regularly and (to them) painlessly. Fantastic plot AND twins? Yes pls. So thanks very much, Mum and Dad, for getting it for me for Christmas.

The narrator of Nothing To See Here is Lillian. She has grown up in a working-class family with a mother who barely pays her attention and very few expectations for her life – but she is gifted, and that helps her find a place at a prestigious boarding school. She feels alienated from the wealthy, selfish people who surround her – but makes a friend in Madison, who is no less wealthy than the others, but is friendly.

Until… Madison is found with drugs. Her family persuade Lillian to take the fall for this indiscretion, assuring her that she’ll be let off with a slap on the wrist. Instead, she is expelled. Her one chance of making something of her life is over. Despite this, Madison and Lillian remain penpals for years to come – not revealing much of their lives in these letters, and growing further and further apart in terms of the lives they lead. But when Madison needs help, it’s Lillian she turns to. (All of this is just backstory to the main event, but Wilson makes it compelling even while we rattle through it – the point is to indicate the sort of people we’re dealing with, and the hopelessness that now suffuses Lillian’s soulless day-to-day.)

Madison has married a Senator – one who is uptight and whose only concern is good PR for his career progression. He has twin children from his first marriage and they need somebody to look after them – a sort of governess.

“I guess I can do it,” I offered, so lame. I made my voice harden. I made my body turn into steel. “I’ll do it, Madison. I can do it.”

She reached across the sandwiches and hugged me, hard. “I can’t tell you how much I need you,” she said. “I don’t have anyone. I need you.”

“Okay,” I said. My whole life, maybe I was just biding time until Madison needed me again, until I was called into service and I made everything good. It honestly wasn’t a bad life, if that’s all it was.

That’s also a taste of Wilson’s writing. I really appreciated it – it is spare but characterful, giving us a sense of exactly who Lillian is, often with sad little twists to the end of thoughts, like the one above. I’m jumping ahead, but when Lillian accepts and moves into the guest house of the extremely rich family, there is this paragraph – and what a great second sentence it is:

I hadn’t brought anything with me. I knew that if I asked, a hairbrush would appear, a toothbrush and four different kinds of toothpaste, but I tried to pretend I was self-sufficient. A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.

That sort of phrasing wouldn’t work for every character, because not every character is given to pithy self-reflection – but Lillian is at a stage of her life where she is trying to work out how she’s got there, why she acts like she does, and what she might be able to change to avoid a future lived entirely in a rut. She’s also clearly very intelligent, and so those sort of internal reflections work for.

What Madison doesn’t initially mention is the whole spontaneous combustion thing. And the twins aren’t keen to move into their father’s estate with this new governess – here is the first time we see the combustion, with a twist to the end of the moment which I’m beginning to recognise as a Kevin Wilson flourish:

“I’m not coming with you!” Bessie shouted, and she found some hidden strength inside her, pulled free of my arms, and started to run for the house. I grabbed her ankle and she fell, hard, skinning her knee. Her shirt started smoking, the fabric singeing along the neckline, but it was soaking wet and couldn’t really catch fire. I realized there were delicate waves of yello flame moving up and down Bessie’s little arms. And then, like a crack of lightning, she burst fully into flames, her body a kind of firework, the fire white and blue and red all at once. It was beautiful, no lie, to watch a person burn.

Bessie is the dominant twin, feisty and occasionally violent. Roland tends to follow where she leads, though both of them are evidently hurt – maybe even traumatised. Not by their curious condition, but by a life of rejection by people who should love them. They haven’t had anybody they could truly trust, and neither they nor Lillian really know if she is trustworthy. Nobody has ever depended on her, and she finds connection with other people difficult. But she cares, and that is a good place to start.

The brilliance of Nothing To See Here, like so many fantastic novels, is that the strange premise is only a starting point for something much more grounded. Wilson’s novel is very moving, and the book is really about children who haven’t been properly cared for and a woman who is aimless. The spontaneous combustion is a hook on which to hang genuine emotions and fears. The book is often funny too, and that’s largely because of the breezy, devil-may-care narrative voice – Lillian hasn’t much to lose, and her interplay of defeatism and dawning hope is both touching and amusing.

I loved the book. It’s a page-turner and it’s much deeper than you might initially think. The logistics of the spontaneous combustion are explored but never fully worked out – Wilson is too wise to get buried into the whys and wherefores. His book is about people, not the mechanics of world-building. Whether or not you like a quirky idea at the heart of a novel, I think you could well love this book. He is a deceptively good writer, making it look easy, but Nothing To See Here is a very impressive achievement.

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

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Such a Fun Age: 'The book of the year' Independent (Bloomsbury Publishing): Amazon.co.uk: Reid, Kiley: 9781526612144: Books

I don’t hear much about the latest fiction, but there are some titles that break through my early-20th-century mindset. Everyone was talking about Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid five years ago, including being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and I think it became even bigger during the pandemic. Better late than never, I listened to the audiobook – and, yes, everyone was right. It’s one of the best 21st-century novels I’ve read.

The novel opens with a brilliant ‘set piece’. Emira is out for the night with friends, in her party clothes and a few drinks down. She gets an emergency phone call from Alix, asking her to take Briar for the evening. Briar is a three-year-old whom Emira often babysits, and she agrees to come straight away and takes Briar to a nearby supermarket. Emira is African-American; Briar (and her parents) are white. When an older white woman sees them together, she thinks Briar is in danger and speaks to a security guard. He refuses to believe Emira is the babysitter.

It’s an excellent way in to a clever and nuanced novel about race in contemporary America. None of Reid’s central characters are out-and-out racists. What makes it so thought-provoking, and often hard to read, is that Reid is spearing the white progressives who are so self-conscious about being anti-racism. Alix is a writer and influencer whose project LetHer Speak has unexpectedly spiralled her into fame, while Emira starts a romantic relationship with a white man, Kelley, who witnessed the supermarket incident and urges her to go public about it. He doesn’t understand what repercussions Amira would face.

There is much more going on in Such A Fun Age than race, though. Emira is a brilliant portrait of a millennial who is overly qualified for the job she has, and is about to fall off her parent’s healthcare plan, but has no sense of her future. “Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.” Alix is a complex character, swinging between sympathetic and the reverse, anxious and ambitious and never entirely comfortable in what she is doing.

There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like ‘Dope Bitch’ and ‘Y’all Already Know’, then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed.

And, for a zeitgeisty novel, it’s much more than an opinion piece with fictional characters. Reid’s plotting is brilliant. Two of the main characters are connected in a way I didn’t see coming, and Reid is so clever in her creation of their lasting resentments from a shared memory differently remembered. Everyone is so believable, and all the novel’s morals are in convincing shades of grey. Honestly, the only bad thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the title. It’s so flimsy and nothingy, and doesn’t tell you anything about the book.

The audiobook is also up there with the best I’ve listened to. Nicole Lewis is a brilliant narrator, and manages to present Emira’s detailed character so well. Emira often replies briefly – things like “Oh, ok” – and Lewis does an exceptional job of using those small moments to show her discomfort, her intelligence, her refusal to accept everything expected of her.

I bought Such A Fun Age in an Audible sale, and wasn’t even sure I’d ever get round to listening to it. I’m so glad I did. It’s gone from a novel I dimly knew about to one of my best reads of the year.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill #ABookADayInMay Day 26

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Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill (Best of Granta)

I can’t remember who first recommended Dept. of Speculation (2014) to me, but it was on one of the posts where I talked about loving books told in fragments – specifically Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Joan Givner’s Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer. Those are all non-fiction – until I read Offill’s novel, I hadn’t tried anybody doing anything like that for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation is told in hundreds of fragment paragraphs – most over a few lines, though the longest are about a page and the shortest are one or two words. Together, they tell the story of a relationship, from dating to marriage to a lost pregnancy to a child to an affair. I don’t know if there is any autobiography in there – the unnamed female narrator of the fragments is a writing teacher who has published one novel and struggles to write the second. Offill was certainly all those things, though I couldn’t speak to her relationship.

Something I love about this splintered approach to writing is that there are no restrictions on tonal consistency. You might dive suddenly into the most heart-piercing moment of a relationship breakdown, or the joyful surprises of motherhood, or the painful fears of the same. And, next to this emotional peak, Offill will write something entirely objective – about the Voyager space mission, for instance (it is relevant in context), or – well, this is the opening fragment/vignette/call-it-what-you-will:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This approach builds up a composite picture of the relationship that a more traditional, linear novel could do, but it will feel less fresh and perhaps a bit laboured. I don’t think you could get away with the same sharp philosophy or character insight that Offill can use – for instance, this next fragment works because of the format of the book. I think it would feel awkward in a less formally innovative novel:

There is such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

I wasn’t sure that a novel in vignettes could sustain the level of character development one would hope for – particularly over the course of several years. But somehow Offill manages to portray the shifting state of the marriage, and the similarly evolving relationship of mother and daughter. You can convey so much in snapshots.

Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I had left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is so much nuance in the novel. It’s not a case of marriage-collapsed-by-adultery. There is a complex response to it, with some of the complexity being what falls between the vignettes. The absence of every detail doesn’t diminish the novel. Somehow it elevates it.

I was so impressed by Dept. of Speculation (incidentally, the curious title refers to the faux ‘return address’ both the man and the woman would put on the back of letters). I think it’ll stay in my mind for a long time, and I’ll doubtless re-read. If you have any other recommendations of fiction or non-fiction told in vignettes, or fragments of paragraphs, I’d love to hear them.

Elizabeth Goudge and Maggie O’Farrell

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As with previous A Book A Day in May challenges, sometimes I’m doubling up on days – and in the past two days I have finished a 407pp book (The Heart of the Family by Elizabeth Goudge) and a 484pp book (This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell). Before you think I am some sort of reading superhero, I should tell you that I had read most of both of them already. One of the bonuses of having lots of books on the go at once is that it lines up quite a few candidates for this May challenge. Anyway, some quick thoughts about the two books in turn…

The Heart of the Family: Book Three of The Eliot Chronicles

The Heart of the Family (1953) by Elizabeth Goudge

The Heart of the Family is the third in the trilogy about the Eliot family. The first, The Bird in the Tree, was one of my favourite reads last year – I loved the family dynamics, the warmth and clarity with which Goudge wrote about them, and the no-longer-fashionable theme of self-sacrifice. I went onto read the second in the trilogy (though didn’t get around to blogging about it), and really enjoyed that one too – people often single out The Herb of Grace (also published as Pilgrim’s Inn) as their favourite in the series. I can see why, as I loved the theme of setting up a new home, but I missed Lucilla – the matriarch who rather fades into the background.

In the third of the trilogy, Lucilla is somehow still with us – well into her 90s, a little less dominant over her family’s decisions, and in a period of reflecting back on her life and all its triumphs and sorrows. David, the young man with youthful naivety and fervour in The Bird in the Tree, is now an older family man, less impetuous and emotional but still making strained decisions. He has also been successful in his career as an actor, and it has brought him a secretary – Sebastian Weber is the most significant new character in this book. Sebastian intensely dislikes David – and his arrival at the family home challenges both of their views of each other.

But this is truly an ensemble piece. We have grown to know and love (or at least understand) such a wide cast of characters, and it is a poignant pleasure to see more of them. I found myself more drawn, this time, to Margaret and Hillary – two of Lucilla’s children whom she has not loved with extravagant affection of other children and grandchildren, but who are such solid people that I couldn’t help empathising with them intensely.

As before, there is Goudge’s mix of serious Christian spirituality and wry humour. It’s such a pleasure to read a novelist who takes faith seriously, and she is also often great fun. I loved this bit…

For Meg’s religious ideas at this time had been formed more by Mrs. Wilkes than by her mother, and Mrs. Wilkes leaned more to the Old Testament than the New. Sally told Meg shyly and beautifully about the Baby in the manger and the lambs carried in the arms of the Good Shepherd, and Meg listened courteously but was not as yet very deeply impressed, but Mrs. Wilkes’s dramatic accounts of the adventures of the Old Testament heroes sent her trembling to her bed and were quite unforgettable.

“And up to ‘eaven ‘e went,” Mrs. Wilkes would say of Elijah, “with such a clanging and a banging of that fiery chariot that you could’ave ‘eard it from ‘ere to Radford. And all the angels shouted, ducks, and all the archangels blew their trumpets till the sky split right across to let ‘im in. Like a thunderstorm it was, ducks. Somethink awful.”

So, yes, I enjoyed The Heart of the Family – but I did find it very much the worst of the trilogy. The characters were delightful to re-encounter because of my fondness for the family, but the pace and momentum was a bit lacking. It’s a long novel to more or less meander, and there is some hard-to-pin-down quality missing in this book that was there in the other two. It was good, but for some reason it felt a bit like a faint shadow of the other two.

This Must Be The Place (2016) by Maggie O’Farrell

And talking of faint shadows… I won’t bury the lede this time. I really enjoyed this long novel but, again, it’s not as good as the others I’ve read by O’Farrell. I think this is my sixth book by O’Farrell and it’s my least favourite – excellent writing and fascinating characters, but something is missing in the momentum here too. (Sidenote: this beautiful cover was hiding behind the dustjacket.)

It’s too complex a novel for me to cover everything going on – but the gist is that Claudette went missing. She is a world-famous French actor and director who disappeared one day. By the time it became clear that she’d faked her own death, she was away – people knew she was alive, and presumed she was a recluse. In actual fact, she had ended up married to Daniel, an American academic who studies speech development.

Daniel has previously been married to another woman. He has also broken off a previous relationship with a woman who was later found dead. There are children from different stages of his life, some of which he is estranged from.

In typical O’Farrell fashion, we dart all over the place – many, many different relationships and different time periods, from the 1940s to the 2010s. Sometimes we are in America and sometimes in Ireland. A lot of the story has to be pieced together, bit by bit, as more and more is revealed. I’ve described some of it in linear fashion, but that absolutely isn’t how the novel is presented.

I can cope with a bit of jumping around if there is something to keep us hooked. I thought she did it brilliantly in Instructions for a Heatwave, for example. And I did enjoy This Must Be The Place – her writing and characterisation are superb. But I wasn’t really sure what the reason for reading was. In other books of hers, there has been one or more central questions that we want answered. In This Must Be The Place, I wasn’t really sure what that was. It’s in many ways an excellent novel, but I got to the end unsure quite why she’d written it.

As I say, the writing is beautiful, so I want to end with a section that I noted – this is 1940s, with Daniel as a very young man:

Daniel looked at the man. The man looked at him. In later years, he will recollect only dimly the trip he and his mother took on the ferry. He will recall it as a series of sensations: a sock that kept slipping and wrinkling under his heel, the startling white undersides of gulls as they wheeled above him, a girl throwing pizza crust up into the air for them, the amber beads of rust on the rails. And this: the unaccountable sight of his mother sitting with a man who was not his father, her skirt with the sailboat print arranged around her, the man turning toward her and whispering words that Daniel knew were unsettling words, persuasive words, frightening words, her head bowed, as if in prayer.

So perhaps I was a little disappointed by both these books, while also thinking them rather good. It’s a case of expectations being very high, and quite hard to express justly in a quick review! I’m glad to have read them.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.

The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.

In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.

Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.

Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.

I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.

Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

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When I was in Toronto, I met up with a listener to Tea or Books? – Debra – and, after a lovely dinner, we went book shopping. I told her I was on the lookout for Canadian authors writing about present-day Canada, and she had lots of great recommendations. Indeed, if I hadn’t already bought a lot of books in Vancouver, I’d probably have come home with a great deal more. One I couldn’t resist was Bellevue Square (2017) by Michael Redhill. (Sidenote: wouldn’t the cover be amazing if they hadn’t PRINTED on that sticker?) I now follow the cover designer, Jennifer Griffiths, on Instagram and really love her work.

The premise of Bellevue Square really appealed to me: Jean Mason discovers she has a doppelganger. She lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore, husband and two sons, when regular visitors to the bookstore start to ask about the woman who looks exactly like her that they’ve seen in the neighbourhood. Indeed, they thought she was Jean.

Jean doesn’t see the woman herself, but becomes obsessed with discovering her. She even pays someone living in Bellevue Square Park to take photographs when they see this other woman, so she can keep track of her movements. (I believe Bellevue Square Park had an encampment of unhoused people in tents at the time of writing the novel.) She meets other people who know both women, such as someone in the food market selling pupusa. But then the people who know them both start dying.

If this sounds like I’ve given a lot away than, hoo boy, you’re in for a wild ride. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of Bellevue Square – but it’s certainly not the novel it seems going in. Indeed, it reinvents itself constantly. And the bit about people dying is revealed in a brilliant sentence on p.8:

I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.

Reading Bellevue Square felt a bit like watching the brilliant film The Father, which disorients the viewer over and over and over, giving a sense of what it is like to have dementia. Jean doesn’t have dementia, but the novel never leaves us on steady ground. Everything we think we know is repeatedly undermined, and even when you think the new piece of information has put you on more solid ground, the rug gets pulled from under you again.

What makes Redhill’s novel so masterful is that Bellevue Square feels so compelling and readable, even when you don’t have a clue what to believe. This sort of trickery could be irritating or confusing from another writer’s pen, but it is done so confidently that you always know you’re in safe hands. Wisely, he leans into clarity and simplicity in the prose – it often feels beautifully written, and is very sharp and funny in places, but he avoids anything overly elaborate. If the plot is a mystery to us, then let’s make sure the individual sentences aren’t. It also helps that the novel is anchored by Jean – her incisiveness, her determination, her wit, her occasional abrasiveness. She was a very compelling character.

I loved reading the novel – and it helped that I knew the streets that Jean was walking around from my visit last year. The moments of recognition were lovely.

I’m also fascinated by the cultural significance of doppelgangers. They come up time and again, from Dostoevsky’s The Double onwards (and probably before) – and every time people mention Shelley seeing his doppelganger shortly before he died. And, yes, it’s mentioned in Bellevue Square too. Readers seem captivated by the idea of encountering their doppelganger, and it is a phenomenon laden with eeriness and even menace. Reading a novel like Bellevue Square as an identical twin is quite an unusual experience. Because I have a doppelganger and have always had one – this spectre that is so eerie to most people is normal, everyday experience for me and for the other identical twins reading this book. So it’s interesting to see the experience from another side, used as the central plot point of a book. (I also think that most people, if they met their doppelganger, wouldn’t think it looked much like them. You know how photos never look like you-in-the-mirror? It’s like that having an identical twin.)

Let’s finish with a quote from early in the book that isn’t very relevant to the rest of the novel – but I love anything about arranging books:

But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.

There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdate parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage (which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.