Transcription by Kate Atkinson

The thing about time is that it changes everything and nothing.  Juliet Armstrong, the main character in Kate Atkinson's new novel Transcription, considers this as she dies.  Juliet is hit by a car while crossing a street in 1981 after a Shostakovich. In her dying moments, she remembers attending the 1942 premier of the Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall while World War II was being fought:

The Russians had been their enemies and then they were their allies, and then they were enemies again.  The Germans the same -- the great enemy, the worst of all of them, and now they were our friends, one of the mainstays of Europe.  It was all such a waste of breath.  War and peace.  Peace and war.  It would go on forever without end. 

Atkinson opens the novel with Juliet's death in 1981.  But time in an Atkinson novel doesn't always run in a straightforward linear fashion.  Transcription is no different. We are immediately transported back to 1950, when not-quite-30 year-old Juliet is a producer of children's radio programming for the BBC, and then even further back to 1940 when a very young Juliet is recruited to work for MI5, Britain's domestic counter intelligence agency.

Juliet, still recovering from her mother's death, doesn't particularly like the man who interviews her for the MI5 job and doesn't seem to particularly care if she gets the job.  The answers she gives to many of his questions are out-and-out lies mostly because she doesn't think it is any of his business but partly because hiding the truth seems to come naturally to her.

Later she learned that Miles Merton (for that was his entire name) knew everything about her - more than she knew herself - including every lie and half-truth she told him at the interview. It didn't seem to matter. In fact, she suspected that it helped in some way.

Being able to lie with a straight face is a good talent for a spy, but at first Juliet is not given any spying duties.  Working for MI5 may sound exciting but Juliet's principal job is typing transcripts of meetings of "fifth columnists" - British citizens sympathetic to the Nazis - whom Juliet and her MI5 team refer to as the "neighbors." (The fifth columnists meet in a flat in Pimlico while MI5 is right next door listening to everything they say.) Juliet makes tea, cleans things and types.  She wants to do more.  She is also somewhat enamored of her boss, Perry Gibbons, whom everyone except Juliet seems to know is gay. The lynchpin of the operation is an MI5 operative named Godfrey Toby.   It is when 1950's Juliet runs into Godfrey Toby on a London street, and he pretends not to know her, that she begins to think back about that operation and her life during the war.  Then she receives a mysterious message warning her that she will "pay" for what she did.  What exactly did she do?

Atkinson has written an old fashioned spy novel, combined with a 1950's paranoid thriller all wrapped up in a post-modern novel. (Actually, not being an English major I have no idea if post-modernism is the correct term, but it seems right.) 

In some ways the novel is an homage to John Le Carre and his George Smiley novels.  Godfrey Toby even looks a bit like Smiley:

It was him, she knew it was him.  The same (somewhat portly) figure, the bland, owlish face, the tortoiseshell spectacles, the old trilby.

As George Smiley is breathtakingly ordinary, so is Godfrey Toby.

Juliet used to think that someone who seemed as ordinary as Godfrey Toby must be harboring a secret -- a thrilling past, a dreadful tragedy -- but as time had gone by she'd realized that being ordinary was his secret.  It was the best disguise of all really, wasn't it?  

In some ways, the novel reminded me a bit of the (unfortunately cancelled) BBC television show The Hour:  a bright, woman producer dealing with red tape and bureaucracy and sexism of the BBC during the paranoid 1950's.

But, as with all Atkinson novels, this novel is its own unique self and not a replica of anyone else's work. This is, as with Atkingson's other novels, a novel of ideas.  The "true self" is a theme of this novel.  Not just Juliet's true self but also the other people that Juliet encounters during her life.   In the 1950s Juliet thinks about this:

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck.  Inside each pearl there was a little piece of grit.  That was the true self of the pearl, wasn't it?  The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself.  From the grit.  From the truth. 

Also, as with other Atkinson novels, this is a novel about women and how they must deal with a world in which they must often hide their true selves.  Especially from their bosses, who are inevitably men.  Here, Juliet is listening to Perry, her boss, ramble on:

A girl could die of old age following a metaphor like this, Juliet thought. "Very nicely put, sir," she said.

Juliet is never what she seems and she constantly reminds herself that means no one else is what they seem.  She has a "long-held belief that appearances were invariably deceptive". 

In the 1940's Juliet is given the opportunity to take on false identities and actually be a "spy" for a short time as part of one of Perry Gibbons' operations.  As "Iris Carter-Jenkins" Juliet is asked to infiltrate a right wing group.  As "Madge Wilson" Juliet pretends to be a bereaved sister. Juliet is a natural at this but in the 1950's, looking back, she thinks that she has been "too many people"  and wonders about her true self:

And then there was Juliet Armstrong, of course, who some days seemed like the most fictitious of them all, despite being the "real" Juliet.  But then, what constituted real?  Wasn't everything, even this life itself, just a game of deception?

As a snapshot of life in two of Britain's oldest establishments (MI5 and the BBC) and a snapshot of life during the war and immediately after the war, this is a fascinating novel.  I did think, however, that the plot slightly got away from Atkinson at the very end..  

However, all in all, I greatly enjoyed this novel.  For me, the best parts (as with all Kate Atkinson novels) were the touches of humor that Atkinson brought to an otherwise serious story.  Juliet's private thoughts can be very funny.  For instance, here is  the first time that Juliet eats a lobster and is instructed to pull the legs off and suck out the meat:

Despite some reluctance, she followed his instructions.  After all, it seemed a shame to be boiled alive for nothing.

Or Atkinson's description of the miniature schnauzer, Lily, when one of the MI5 bosses informs Juliet that the dog is to be looked after by Juliet until her owner returns:

The dog, which had been gazing uneasily up at Oliver Alleyne, now turned its attention to Juliet. She hadn't realized that a dog could look doubtful.

Any Kate Atkinson novel is to be savored for the writing and this one is no different. 

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

The age of Hamilton (the hit musical, not the man) is spawning a new interest in eighteenth century America, something that seemed impossible just a few years ago.  Characters sporting powdered hair, breeches and tri-corner hats are no longer assumed to be beyond the understanding of today's audiences, but are understood to harbor the same emotions and flaws that one might find among one's own neighbors.  Or at least on any modern cable television drama. 

Francis Spufford sets his novel, Golden Hill:  A Novel of Old New York, thirty years before the infamous declaration written in Philadelphia.  On November 1, 1746, a mysterious traveler from London named Richard Smith arrives in New York harbor bound for the firm of Lovell & Company on Golden Hill Street.  Smith presents a bill of exchange drawn upon Lovell & Company for a thousand pounds sterling payable 60 days after presentment - a fortune in that day and age.  During the 60 days that the mysterious Mr. Smith waits for his money, he refuses to tell a soul why he has come to New York, where he came by this fortune or what he will use the funds for, thus commencing much speculation by the denizens of this small city as to his background and his intentions.  Is he a spy?  Is he a representative of one of the ministries of government?  Is he an actor? A Saracen conjurer?  An agent of the French?  Or is he simply a fraud and a scoundrel?

Solving the mystery of Smith and his fortune is not so much the plot of the novel, as an excuse to give us a picture of colonial New York. Eighteenth century New York is as much a character in this novel as any of the human characters.  This is a New York that no longer exists. Indeed it had disappeared by the early nineteenth century, mostly destroyed by war and fire. Not the metropolis that it is today, it occupies only the lower tip of Manhattan island and was small by world standards.  As Spufford points out in his Author's Note, in 1746 the city of New York had a population of only seven thousand while London, the largest city in Europe, had seven hundred thousand.  It is, in fact, a small town compared to London.  And in a small town it is difficult to keep secrets or, indeed, to have a private life. Mr. Smith finds that, within 24 hours of his arriving, "the news was all around the town that a stranger had arrived with a fortune in his pocket."

The people of this colonial city are familiar and yet foreign to Mr. Smith.  He is astonished to discover on his first day in the city that the faces of women are not marked by the pox as they are in Europe. He also finds that New York does not stink as London does.  "A Scene of City-Life, his eyes reported. A Country-Walk, in a Seaside District, his nostrils counter argued. No smells; also, he realized, no beggars."  And the people were taller than he expected.  "He was used, in the piazza of Covent Garden, to stand taller by a head than the general crowd; but here, in the busy bobbing mass of heads, he was no taller than the average."

We explore the streets of old New York with Smith; they are not only described but they are named. Smith chases a thief from the tip of Manhattan up to the commons; he winds through the streets visiting every tavern and dive looking for a particular kind of investigator.  At one point, suspected of being a papist French spy, he is chased through the town by a drunken mob.  One recommendation to the publishers:  a map of Old New York would have been useful to those of us who are not native and could not follow the street by street descriptions in our minds. 

One of the joys of this novel is its depiction of commerce in eighteenth century America and specifically how the shortage of real money (coin money) made transactions difficult. Mr. Smith discovers this when he tries to convert some gold guineas into smaller change in the local currency:

Lovell accordingly began to count out a pile of creased and folded slips next to the silver, some printed black and some printed red and some brown, like the despoiled pages of a prayerbook, only of varying shapes and sizes; some limp and torn; some leathery with grease; some marked only with dirty letterpress and others bearing coats-of-arms, whales spouting, shooting stars, feathers, leaves, savages; all of which he laid down with the rapidity of a card dealer, licking his fingers for the better passage of it all.

"Wait a minute," said Mr. Smith.  "What's this?"

"You don't know our money, sir?" said the clerk.  "They didn't tell you we use notes, specie being so scarce, this side?"

"No," said Smith.

The pile grew.

"Fourpence Connecticut, eightpence Rhode Island," murmured Lovell. "Two shilling Rhode Island, eighteenpence Jersey, one shilling Jersey, eighteenpence Philadelphia, one shilling Maryland ..."

It makes one appreciate the banking genius of Alexander Hamilton after the revolution. But Alexander Hamilton is not yet born, much less arrived in New York to attend Kings College (Columbia University).  Indeed there is no King's College yet.

As the title states, this is a novel of "Old New York" not a novel about the thirteen colonies or even about North America.  Except for one short errand up the Hudson, the action all takes place in lower Manhattan.  There are no visits to the larger city of Philadelphia or up to Boston.  There is almost no discussion of the other colonies.  There is, in fact, little discussion of the vast continent that lies across the Hudson River. At one point someone points out to Smith that New York is crowded with transient persons - they disembark from ships and then leave, the continent "devouring" them.  But Smith is remarkably incurious about the continent, only once or twice reflecting on its vastness. When native Americans are mentioned, it is generally in connection with the war with the French.  And not one native American seems to be residing in New York during Mr. Smith's time there; or at least he never encounters one. 

 

This is a novel about how normal New York would seem to a Londoner, while at the same time remaining foreign. The people are in some ways more patriotic than Londoners.  Smith is constantly surprised by the fervor with which the people support, and toast, King George II.  But at the same time they are obsessed with the idea of liberty.  The City is in the midst of an ideological battle between adherents of the Assembly, led by chief judge DeLancey ("a massive and statuesque Roman head, finely modeled at ear and nose, like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor"), and Governor Clinton ("with a peanut-shaped brow and an anxious expression letting down the blue and gold of his coat").  The Assembly adherents are strongly protective of their sole right over the purse strings; the Governor is desperate for a budget.

War with France is on the minds of the people of New York.  They are bothered by the idea that they are alone on the other side of the Atlantic to fight the French (and papist) enemy on their border. But they are also outraged that the Governor has sent a regiment into upstate New York and expects New York to support them.  In fact the Assembly has not deigned to vote any money for support.  

But this political background is not really the point.  The point is that, while it is a British colony, New York is also different than Britain.  News from Europe about the waging of the war in Europe arrives slowly and late.  Even the name of the war is foreign to Mr. Smith.  King George's war, the local people call it. "We call all our wars, here, by the names of monarchs; as, King William's War, Queen Anne's War, King George's."  Smith again remarks that they are quite the royalists in New York.  It  turns out that Smith's assumption that New York does not have its own dangers, political and otherwise, is what gets him into trouble time and again.

For all the New Yorkers' talk of liberty, Smith is constantly aware that some in the City are not at liberty.  Enslaved black people populate the City.  They seem to be almost invisible to the white population and yet they are everywhere, carrying on the work that the upper classes don't want to do.  Smith and the narrator are always aware of them, whether they have names like Achilles, a slave of the Governor's staff, and Zephyra, who acts as a sort of chaperone and maid for the Lovell daughters, or the unnamed black musician who plays at a dinner party given by the Lovells. 

And others, while more at liberty than slaves, still find themselves fettered by society.  This is not a society in which open homosexuality is tolerated.  And women are not as free as men to follow their desires.  When women do act on their impulses, society spurns them.

 

For a time it isn't clear whether Spufford is simply trying to do a better job than most white male writers at accurately representing the diversity of a society or whether there is a method to this inclusiveness.  Eventually it becomes clear that all of this diversity is a necessary component of his plot, which is both a delight and a relief.  

In form, this novel walks a line between imitating the style of an eighteenth century author and making it readable to modern eyes.  Not being well versed in the novels of Fielding and other novelists of the time, I can't say if he successfully captures their style.  It was a relief that after the first few paragraphs, he seemed to move into a more modern mode.  A small part of the novel is epistolary and while I generally love epistolary novels, I thought that was the weakest part of the novel although it became clear why the author felt it was necessary.

Most of the novel uses an omniscient narrator who does sometimes break the fourth wall and address the audience in humorous ways.  At one point the narrator admits that the description of a duel had to be researched in a book as the author had no experience of sword fighting and another time the narrator simply gives up on the attempt to describe the rules of a card game.  One of the best moments in the novel is when the omniscient narrator grows bored (or embarrassed) describing a sex scene from the point of view of a male character and suddenly suggests that we look at it from the point of view of the woman, going on to give a perceptive but humorous description. 

There is a romance of sorts in the novel.  The characters, familiar with Shakespeare, compare themselves to Beatrice and Benedick but allow that they aren't really very much like them.  In fact, the play that is never mentioned but seems to be the model for part of the novel is The Taming of the Shrew.  A wealthy man with two daughters.  One, the younger, is lovely and docile and has suitors.  The older may be lovely but is a shrew that no one wants to marry.  Perhaps the newly arrived stranger in town will take her off their hands?  

Shakespeare's Kate is a fascinating and yet frustrating character.  Each actress must make her own artistic decisions about Kate's motivation as Shakespeare never really explains her . And of course she is cured or "tamed"in the end,  the moral seemingly being that whether you are a shrew or not is a choice made solely by the individual.  The cage is of your own making.  Spufford makes it more interesting.  Is the cage of your own making?  Or is it made by society?  Or does it exist because of a part of your nature you can't change?  Or is it some combination? In the end, this is the question that readers will be debating in their own minds (or with friends) after they put down this novel.  

Spufford has now won the Desmond Elliott prize for debut novels as well as the Costa award for first novels (he has written other nonfiction books, but never a novel) as well as the Ondaatje award for books with a sense of place.  With such a striking debut, I look forward to more from his pen in the future.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

After reading Lauren Groff's Arcadia last month, a novel about people with whom I found it hard to relate to at all, I was thrilled to read Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings.  From the first chapter I thought "Now, these are my people."

For one thing, most of the characters were my age (ok, they were one year older than me, but at my age that doesn't count.)  For another thing, although I never went to a summer camp for talented teenagers like they did (I never went to a summer camp at all), I did spend my high school years surrounded by people talented in The Arts.   And ... at the age of 14 I made friends for life, just like they did - there is still a group of close friends I get together with on a regular basis.  And ... while I recognized very early (by the end of high school) that I didn't have enough talent to make a living in The Arts (and so gave up playing the piano altogether) I still always wished I could have.

Among my group of high school friends, two of them majored in theater, one of whom is a working actor in Chicago.  I have no illusions that it is an easy life but I love to hear her talk about it when we get together.  People I knew from high school musical productions went on to Broadway and among that group, one of the nicest of them (then, and he still seems to be) is a successful Grammy and Emmy award winning Broadway producer, composer and musical director.

So, I very much could relate to Jules, the principal character in this novel who spends the summer of 1974, the summer that Richard Nixon resigned, at a camp for talented artistic kids, making friends for life.  One of her friends, Ethan, becomes incredibly successful as a cartoonist, eventually creating a television series as long running as The Simpsons and making tons of money.

Jules and Ethan date during that summer of 1974 but Jules finally tells Ethan that she likes him but "not like that".  They stay very close friends through their lives though, and Ethan marries Jules' best friend from camp, Ash.  Ash is an actress who really wants to direct feminist plays.  I'm not giving much away here, we find out all of this in the first two chapters of this long novel.   Another friend, Jonah, is a talented musician, the son of a famous folk singer from the 60's.  Jonah doesn't want to pursue a career in music.   Another friend, Cathy, is a talented dancer, but unfortunately she has the wrong body-type to succeed as a professional dancer.   And then there is Ash's brother, Goodman, who is charismatic but lacks, to say the least, direction.  These 6 kids decide that they will be friends for life and dub themselves, only semi-ironically, "The Interestings".

The novel jumps around in time: 1974 in chapter one, then 2009 in chapter two, and then back in time to the early 1980's.  This was clever of Wolitzer.  She sets up Jules as the Everywoman we can relate to at the camp and in Chapter 2 we find out that Jules is still the Everywoman out of the group.  Jules and her wonderful, but very ordinary, husband Dennis have a good marriage and Normal Careers as a therapist (Jules) and a medical tech (Dennis).   Meanwhile we also find out in Chapter Two, via Ash and Ethan's Christmas Letter, that Ash and Ethan are fabulously wealthy and now married to each other with kids.  How did that happen, we wonder.   And do Jules and Dennis receive The Christmas Letter simply because they are on a very long list of recipients that includes people who long ago were friends?  No, we discover that Jules and Ash are still best friends and talk to each other all the time.   But that doesn't mean that Jules isn't jealous of Ethan and Ash's successful lives. 

Jules spends much of her life thinking that she is uninteresting because she leads a Normal Life and not a life in The Arts.  She loves her husband despite, or maybe because, of the fact that he is so normal.  And at one point, in a moment of truth between them, Dennis dares to tell Jules that her friends really aren't that interesting. Wolitzer doesn't shy away from showing what hard work a good marriage is.  In fact, the life of Jules could have been the subject of a Small Novel, otherwise known as a Woman's Novel.  In fact, Wolitzer could have written a Small Novel about any one of the characters.  Or she could have written a series of Small Novels that would, eventually, cover the same characters and their lives.  But instead she chose to write a Big Novel.  And it is big - in length, in scope and in ideas.

The story Wolitzer chooses to tell spans many decades - the years between the resignation of Nixon through the AIDS epidemic, the 90's bubble years, the fall of the Towers and the financial crisis of 2008, ending in the present day as the friends enter their mid 50's. One of the things I liked was that each of these historical events happens off stage, it isn't dwelled on by Wolitzer.  Jules remembers that the camp was brought together to watch Nixon leaving office - but there is no actual scene in the novel depicting that moment. The fall of the Towers isn't shown.  The AIDS epidemic is introduced to the characters exactly as I remember being introduced to it in the early 1980's - the characters hear that someone who was gay suddenly died and there is no real explanation why.  Only later when AIDS was identified did you suddenly realize "Oh, he died of AIDS. Oh. "

This is also a Big Novel in the sense of having a lot of characters.  Besides the six campers who become friends for life, and Dennis, we meet Ash and Goodman's parents, who impose a family secret on Ash that she shares only with Jules (Ash's father is an investment banker at Drexel Burnam and I waited throughout the novel for its fall to happen.) We catch glimpses of Jules' widowed mother and sister Ellen.  There is the elderly couple who run the camp.  There is Jonah's Japanese American lover who is HIV positive, as well as Jonah's folk singer mother.   There are even Moonies.

But what makes this a Big Novel is that it is a novel that explores a Big Idea - an exploration of talent and lack of talent and and the affect of talent, and its lack, on those with talent and the people around them.  It also explores the relationship between talent and money (and the lack of money). Can friendship survive unequal wealth?   Can marriage?  Jules must deal with the fact that she really isn't talented, while her friends are.  Ash, on the other hand, is talented but could certainly never support herself on that talent - the fact that she came from a wealthy family and is married to the even wealthier Ethan allows her to become a director of small, critically acclaimed feminist off-Broadway plays.  Ash is talented but Jules is aware that Ash's ability to use her talent is dependent on her being supported by Ethan. This doesn't seem to bother Ash - but if Jules was married to Ethan would it have bothered her?

Ethan is a generous soul and is willing to help out Jules and Dennis, but that bothers Jules.  How much can you accept from wealthier friends in order to be able to travel in the same circles before the friendship is threatened?  Do you let them always pick up the tab at dinner?  Do you let them pay for vacations to fantastic places?  Do you let them give you gifts of money?  (I was pleased that Wolitzer was smart enough to frame this question as a gift of cash and not a loan.  In my experience - loans are much harder on friendships, making clear that one friend is indebted to the other friend in ways other than monetary.  A gift is ... a gift.)

Wolitzer also asks us to consider the price paid by a person who stifles real talent.  Jonah is a natural musician but because of an incident that occurred to him as a child, he refuses to allow himself to be even an amateur musician and while he develops a successful career in robotics he does not find it fulfilling.  Cathy, the dancer, knows early on that she will not be a dancer because of her physique and instead becomes a successful businesswoman.  Is she fulfilled?  We don't know because the friends lose touch with Cathy after a terrible incident.  And then there is Goodman.  Did he ever really have talent or did everyone just assume he did because he was so charismatic?

Only Ethan, naturally talented, manages through hard work and some luck and good advice, to become successful beyond everyone's wildest dreams. He is also generous.  On the other hand, Ethan becomes a workaholic and is ashamed of how he reacts to adversity in his own personal life.

At one point Ethan decides to use his wealth to bring "good" to the world by fighting child labor in Asia.  Ethan is one of the Most Powerful People in the World.  Is Ethan's high profile use of his wealth any more "good" than Jules' work with her low income therapy patients?  Why are good works by the wealthy valued more than the good that is brought by the less wealthy as part of their daily lives?  Why does Jules value her work less than Ethan's work?

And, finally,  is a novel about Big Ideas like these, written over a broad scope of time with many characters, inherently more worthy than a  Small Novel about only Jules and Dennis and the many issues of their daily lives that Wolitzer might have written?  It seemed to me, as I finished this novel, that this final question is the disguised-in-plain-sight biggest of the Big Ideas of this novel.  If Wolitzer leaves us wishing for more about Cathy or Ash or even Ash's mother Betty (or, for that matter, even about Jules' mother), she leaves us hungry for the kind of Small Novels that sometimes get characterized as Women's Fiction.  This is a wonderful Big Novel, but that doesn't make it more worthy than smaller novels.  It does however probably make it more marketable to what is known as a wider audience.  An audience that includes men.

Wolitzer is certainly aware of this.  And this Big Novel is certainly being marketed in a way that won't automatically turn men off.  Wolitzer must be aware of this too.  She wrote a New York Times Book Review essay last year  in which she pointed out how novels by women are often marketed as "women's" novels when novels written by men about the same subject matter are called universal stories.  She also noted that the cover art of novels written by women often make it unlikely a man will want to pick it up to read.

The Interestings has, I presume due to this very essay, gender neutral cover art.  When I went to my local Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy, the clerk assuredly led me over to where it was supposed to be shelved - but it wasn't there.  Puzzled, he looked it up on his computer.  It had just come out; he remembered shelving it.  "Well," he said, looking up at me, "it's already sold out."   I didn't mind waiting for the next shipment.  I just hope some of those early buyers were men. 

I Recommend Robertson Davies

I'm in one of my reading slumps these days.  I've started two or three books but I just can't find the time or the energy or the will to finish them. Life should get better in November December (I hope) so I can get back to reading for pleasure.

Someone (I wish I could remember who) mentioned Robertson Davies the other day and I've been thinking of re-reading some of his novels.  Maybe I'll do that after the first of the year.

If you haven't read him, you should.

"Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge."

"Certainly."

"You say that a man's first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job."

"Of course."

"Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position."

Robertson Davies from his novel Tempest-Tost

Swamped with a Donkey and a Monkey

I'm almost to the end of my vacation book blogging and by now I'm kinda-sorta cheating because I didn't read these books on vacation; I read them just after I got back from vacation.  One I took with me to the lake but never got to it; the other I thought about taking to the lake but didn't throw it into the box. 

Swamplandia, by Karen Russell is a debut novel.  It is an odd story about thirteen year old Ava Bigtree who lives with her family at Swamplandia, a gator-wrestling theme park in Florida.  Her mother has died of cancer and without her the theme park and the family are falling apart. Ava's father neglects the children.  Her brother Kiwi abandons them.  Her sister Osceola disappears, having eloped with a ghost. A creepy guy called the Bird Man shows up and offers to take Ava to find her sister. I won't give any more away but you can see why I say it's an odd story.

As a first novel, it is promising.  It will be interesting to see what her second novel does. The biggest reason I didn't care for this novel was that the whole concept of a gator-wrestling theme park seemed like a gimmick to disguise the fact that she was writing yet another story about a modern dysfunctional family .   The truth is, I was bored by the descriptions of the gators and the wrestling.   Once you take away the alligators the plot didn't seem that original.  I was surprised by nothing that happened to any of the characters. 

Russell does, however, create interesting characters and does a fairly good job with the voices of Ava and Kiwi.  Despite being able to predict pretty much every thing that was going to happen to them, I still cared about Ava and Kiwi (Osceola, not so much).  That's a good achievement in a first novel and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Beatrice and Virgil is a novel by Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi which I really enjoyed.  I enjoyed this one much less.  It started out promising, an author very similar to Martel writes a novel involving animals that has unexpected success (just like Life of Pi).  But the author's next novel is unpublishable.  It isn't really clear why it is unpublishable but it has something to do with the fact that he tries to write about the Holocaust in a creative way that has never been done before.  Whatever that means.

The Holocaust has been written about so much I can't imagine there is a new way to write about it that would work.   And, in fact, the rest of the novel is supposedly Martel writing about the Holocaust in a whole new way involving the story of a strange taxidermist and two of his "stuffed" animals:  a Donkey and a Monkey named Beatrice and Virgil.  The taxidermist is writing a story about them which involves long (looong) conversations about nothing.  I mean nothing in the way that Seinfeld was about nothing.   The conversations were sometimes entertaining or informative and I would get engrossed only to finally realize that they weren't going anywhere.

I'm just going to admit right now that when I got to the end of this novel I felt like I had totally missed something.  I have no idea what Martel was trying to say or show with this novel.  And I do feel that Martel was trying to say something or show something.  I just don't think that people killing animals (even wholesale slaughter of animals) is the same as the murder of millions of Jews.  And I truly didn't understand why the bloody end of the novel was necessary.  I felt that perhaps I should go back and re-read the end of the novel but, the truth is, I didn't care enough to take the time. 

As I said a few posts ago, maybe this year it was just me and I wasn't in the mood for the kind of reading I brought with me.  Or maybe I chose novels that weren't as good as in past years.  But, whatever the reason, I found this summer's reading disappointing compared to other summers. 

Ah well, maybe my winter reading will be better.

More Summer Book Reports

When I go on vacation I take a whole box of books.  It helps that my parents drive up to the cabin in advance with a large vehicle and I can send the box with them.  I save books throughout the year, thinking "oh, I'll read that on vacation."  Even now that I regularly read on my iPad, I couldn't imagine not having a box of books to read.  And of course I don't get through all of them.  I live in fear, however, of running out of books on vacation.  At one time there was a fairly good little bookstore in Fort Frances Ontario.  If it rained and we went "into town" I could pick up a book.  But it closed long ago.  So it is important to come prepared.

I think, however, that the iPad experience this year caused me to put fewer "real" books aside for vacation.  As the date approached when the box was due at my parents I started to worry that I didn't have enough books.  So I made a trip to my local book store and picked up a couple to throw in.  I ended reading them both.

The first was Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.  Truthfully, I think it was the cover art that attracted me.  It was a photograph of an elegant woman on an outdoor chaise lounge with a man in evening clothes sitting on a chair in front of her with his back to us, cocktails on the table next to them.  The cover said it was about Manhattan during the Depression.  It started, however, in the 1960's at an art exhibition where an artist was exhibiting photographs he took during the Depression.   The novel is told in the first person (mostly) and the narrator and I got off to a bad start.

The narrator, who isn't immediately identified, is describing the 1960's:

So all of us were drunk to some degree. We launched ourselves into the evening like satellites and orbited the City two miles above the Earth, powered by failing foreign currencies and finely filtered spirits. We shouted over the dinner tables and slipped away into empty rooms with each other's spouses, carousing with all the enthusiasm and indiscretions of Greek gods.  And in the morning, we woke at 6:30 on the dot, clearheaded and optimistic, ready to resume our places behind the stainless steel desks at the helm of the world.

The narrator then, a few paragraphs later, mentions Val, a man who the narrator calls sweetheart.  Ok, I thought. A gay couple in the 1960's.  Ok.  But then it turns out the narrator is a woman.  Wait.  A Woman?  I went back and read the first few pages again wanting to see why I had assumed it was a man.   Perhaps because no woman in the 1960's would have said that "we" woke at 6:30 ready to resume "our" places at the desks at the helm of the world.   This was the 1960's!   Women weren't at the helm of the world! Or at least not enough of them to be a "we".

From that point on I became obsessed with instances where I thought the (male) author screwed up the voice of the female narrator.  It didn't happen often but it did occasionally and it really pretty much ruined the whole experience for me. 

The other book I picked up at the last minute was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (not that Elizabeth Taylor, the other one - the author).  I had never read any of Ms. Taylor's novels before but had heard good things about them so I thought I would give this one a whirl.  I quite enjoyed it.  Mrs. Palfrey is an elderly widow who moves into a hotel for elderly people - one of those residence hotels that used to exist everywhere.  It is actually a sad story but not maudlin.  I enjoyed Taylor's style which is spare but still descriptive.

From the window she could see - could see only -- a white brick wall down which dirty rain slithered, and a cast-iron fire-escape, which was rather graceful.  She tried to see that it was graceful.  The outlook - especially on this darkening afternoon -- was daunting; but the backs of hotels, which are kept for indigent ladies, can't be expected to provide a view, she knew.  The best is kept for honeymooners, though God alone knew why they should require it. 

I will definitely read more Elizabeth Taylor.

Finally, I started The Absolutist by John Boyne before I left on vacation and I finished during my layover.  It is another World War One novel and I think in finishing this one, I have them out of my system now.  At this point I was pretty sure I had read everything about the Great War and couldn't be surprised.   Again you have a damaged man who has returned from the War. Seen that before.  He seems haunted by another character that you eventually learned was shot by a firing squad for refusing to fight.  Seen that before.  Soon it becomes clear that the returning character is not just a former soldier, he's a gay former soldier.  Seen that before too.  But in the end Boyne did manage an ending that I had not predicted and explored a little bit of the human psyche that I hadn't seen explored in other novels.  So on the whole it was a good reading experience.

Essays: Modern American Culture and the Classics

Although as a single white middle aged female I don't come close to being the target demographic for GQ Magazine,  I may start regularly thumbing through it just to discover if there are any new pieces of "long form journalism" by John Jeremiah Sullivan.  I took his Pulphead: Essays with me on vacation and it, surprisingly, turned out to be one of the most enjoyable of my deck reads. 

I say "surprisingly" because Sullivan writes about things in which I am not remotely interested.  Christian Rock Music festivals.  Axl Rose.  Bunny Wailer.  Reality TV.   I would begin each Essay assuming that after the first few pages I would get bored and move on to the next.  But Sullivan consistently sucked me in and kept me reading to the end.  To say that his style is engaging doesn't really do it justice.

It is hard to say exactly how he does it.  In some ways, his style is very much like the "everyman" style prevalent in many magazine feature articles today.  The Writer sets out to write a feature article on some element of pop culture but due to circumstances beyond his control the Writer ends up writing as much about himself and his quest as about his ostensible subject.  Sullivan may be writing about a Christianized Woodstock-type festival but he manages to build tension by describing the enormous RV he has rented (it was all that was left) and his adventures in parking it.   He goes to Jamaica to interview Bunny Wailer, the last living member of Bob Marley's band, but ends up spending a great part of the essay telling us about hanging out with the ordinary Jamaican guy he hired to be his driver.  

And per usual in this style of writing, along the way the Writer reveals little bits of himself to the reader, usually in a self-deprecatory way.   Sullivan is no different.  We learn about his past experience with a Christian youth group.  In the last essay (the only one that I had previously read) he writes about the experience of allowing his own home to be used by the television production One Tree Hill.

On the other hand, unlike other writers, when Sullivan really does get down to his subject, he is informed, educated and, most of all, respectful. His essay about Michael Jackson, written after Jackson's death, is one of the best meditations on Michael Jackson that I have ever read.

It's fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person.  During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them ... He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different ... It's only after reading Jet and Ebony that one can understand how otherwise straightforward-seeming people have stayed good friends with Michael Jackson these many years. He is charming; his mind is alive. 

Sullivan doesn't write about American pop culture purely from a fan boy perspective.  He recognizes the dark side of his subjects.  He addresses the allegations of  Michael Jackson's pedophilia. He talks about Axl Rose biting the leg of a security guard.  He admits his annoyance with the One Tree Hill production team.  But he ultimately approaches his subjects with respect.  I got the impression that Sullivan is a person who is truly interested in other people and what makes them tick. Which is, I think, in the end what kept me reading.

 An entirely different kind of respect permeates Daniel Mendelsohn's book of essays: How Beautiful it is and How Easily it Can be Broken.   Mendelsohn writes critically for the New York Review of Books, also ostensibly about modern culture, and I am far more familiar with his work than I was with Sullivans'.  I say that Mendelsohn writs ostensibly about modern culture, meaning that each of his essays is essentially a review of a play, movie or book. But they are much more.  They are almost a course in the classics of ancient literature.

Unlike Sullivan, Mendelsohn doesn't even pretend to be an "everyman".  If Sullivan is "engaging", there is no word to describe Mendelsohn other than erudite (as Mendelsohn himself  might inform you, from the Latin eruditus, "learned",  and from the past participle of the Latin verb erudite, "to educate").  Mendelsohn is what the British used to call a "classics man" (or, maybe they still do, I don't know) and when it comes to the Greeks he knows his stuff.   I was many pages into his review of the Brad Pitt movie Troy before I realized that it was a movie review.  I thought I was simply reading an engrossing essay on lost Greek epics, the meaning of "epic" and pitfalls in constructing "epics" (poetic and otherwise).

A plot, by contrast, is what the Iliad has.  For all its great length, the poem is precisely about what is proposed, in its famous opening line, as its subject matter:  the wrath of Achilles, its origins, its enactment, its consequences.  (So too the Odyssey, whose concomitant episodes all refract what it, in its equally famous opening line, purports to be about:  the "man of many turnings who wandered wide"; no part of the poem does not illuminate his cleverness, his yearning for home, his humanity.)  To be sure, Achilles' rage, as it plays itself out through the poem's twenty-four books, sheds light on a vast host of issues; the meaning of heroism, the nature of war and of peace, the sweetness and bitterness of human life.  But the Iliad is able to illuminate so much precisely because of its searing focus on one praxis, which is what gives it its awesome weight and grandeur.  Which is to say, what makes it truly big, truly "epic."

Of course Troy is a disappointment to Mendelsohn.  But did any of us  really expect it to be good?  Probably not, but most of us probably can't explain in depth that it fails partly because it jettisons the Homeric codes of behavior, which "makes a hash of much of the characters' actions." 

Unlike Sullivan who approaches his subjects warily, expecting them to be strange or trivial or odd, but ends up embracing them wholeheartedly, Mendelsohn seems to approach each experience with great expectations only to find that the reality doesn't live up to the hype.  By the end of the book I was hoping that he would finally find one experience that left him ecstatic.  This is not because he tired me with constant nitpicking.  On the contrary.  He seems so intellectually stimulated by the subjects he writes about, even when they are flawed, that I simply couldn't imagine to what heights he might soar if he found a "worthy" subject.  But, alas, that was not to be. 

I don't think Mendelsohn is for everyone.  At the risk of sounding snobby, I'd say that you really have to like "to think" to enjoy his style.  It probably helps if you have an interest in the classics.  He is not the everyman that Sullivan is. I can, and did, throw the Sullivan into my beach bag.  I needed a quiet place with few distractions to read Mendelsohn.  But I can imagine re-reading Mendelsohn at some point whereas Sullivan was simply a good read for the summer. 

Witches. And Vampires. and Daemons. Oh my.

Just after I finished reading Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches I read an article in The New Yorker by Maria Bustillos in which she quoted George Orwell:

“The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.”

I'm not sure I'd put Witches even in the category of good bad literature.  The writing style is pedestrian and crosses the line into cliche on a regular basis, but every time my eyes would start to hurt from rolling them and I'd think "OK, I'm not sure I can go on with this" she would insert some plot point that would keep me interested and I'd think "Well, maybe a little further ...".  And when I got to the end I knew that I was going to read the sequel.   At some point.

There are people in this world who love to read about witches and vampires.  I am not one of them.

There are people in this world who wouldn't go near a book about witches or vampires with a ten foot pole.  I'm not one of them either. 

On the whole I find stories about vampires and witches silly, my love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter notwithstanding.  And this book is fairly silly.  There wasn't a hint of the vampires and witches being metaphors for a bigger world problem - except maybe, I suppose, racial problems.  But I think that's stretching it.  It's a fairly standard romance novel with a lead character who happens to be a witch and a dark, brooding romantic lead who just happens to be a vampire.  (Seriously, why are Vampires always brooding?  I think that's why Spike was popular - he didn't have the patience to brood long.)  At least Harkness doesn't make the vampires all cuddly.  Having a vampire in your life is, it seems, like choosing to make a wolf your pet.  Maybe you can pull it off but you'll never be completely comfortable around it.

I picked up this book because (1) my friendly neighborhood independent bookseller raved about it to me as a "perfect summer read" and (2) another friend who has similar taste as mine in books said she thought I'd really like it.  And after all the death of Regeneration and its sequels I wanted something light. Of course where there are vampires there is death ...

Deborah Harkness is an historian who has written scholarly works on Elizabethan England.  She says that the idea for this book struck her in 2008 when she wondered:  “if there really are vampires, what do they do for a living?”  I'd put good money on it that in 2008 she looked at the best seller Twilight and thought "For god's sake, even I could write something as good as that."  And then thought "heyyy,  why don't I try?".   And then she wondered what vampires did for a living.  

And good on her for actually coming up with the idea and getting it done.

The plot is decent for a standard romance novel plot and, as I said, it kept me reading.  The characters have potential but are stymied by cliche.  And, to reiterate, the writing style is pedestrian. 

One of the reasons I want to read the sequel is because I kept sensing potential in this novel that didn't quite flower.  I had the sense that many of the cliches were in the novel because she (or her editor) thought "well, I'd better throw this in because it will help the book sell".   In the sections that weren't so cliche ridden (the section where the characters are in the Occitan castle, for instance), her style was better.  Perhaps now that she has a bestseller behind her she'll feel comfortable letting some of the cliches go and get down to writing what she wants to write.  And since the sequel will be set in Tudor England she should be able to throw in a lot of historically accurate details. 

Speaking of detail, I love detail in novels.  This may be because I'm not a very visual reader, I need a lot of help to visualize what I'm supposed to be seeing.  Harkness throws in a lot of detail.  A LOT of detail.  Hopefully in her second novel she'll learn to scatter the detail throughout the scene instead of throwing in pages and pages of description at one time.  I finally just started skimming the food and wine description scenes.

My biggest gripe about this novel is that while it is clear that she wants to create a modern heroine who isn't a damsel in distress - she created a character who is regularly a damsel in distress.  I think that this mostly occurs because Harkness felt she needed to write a "saleable" vampire and so she (cliche alert) writes him as having a very old fashioned possessive streak.  After all, he is 1500 years old and was brought up in a time when men were men and women belonged to them.  It's probably hard to come up with creative ways to show this character trait in a positive way and it's relatively easy to rely on the old standby of putting the heroine in distress and letting the hero take care of her.  Of course to do this you need the heroine to be genuinely in distress and in need of help because otherwise any sane modern woman would just be creeped out by all that possessiveness. 

But once the distress is over, Harkness attempts to make the heroine re-assert her independence. Again and again.  It all ended up a little disjointed.  Maybe by the next novel she'll feel more comfortable with how she writes Vampire Matthew.  It strikes me that a 1500 year old vampire who is a top scholar studying DNA in a very modern medical research facility, who flies in a private jet, is glued to his laptop and is constantly on his cell phone, probably has the ability to evolve his understanding of how to treat women in the same way that he slowly but surely moved from horses to combustion engines to flying machines.  We'll see.   

9/11 Fiction

Commentary Magazine put together a list of 30 novels “with the 9/11 attacks at their backs”.   That got me thinking about what I had read and realizing I’ve not read many of them.

I wasn’t particularly interested in reading novels about September 11 in the first few years after the attacks. After watching hours of television of the attacks that week, I didn’t feel that I needed fiction to make sense of it. And over the past 10 years, the 9/11 novels I have read have been accidental readings where I didn’t know 9/11 was going to be a big part of the novel.

I did read Claire Messud’s novel, The Emperor’s Children.

The best novel to emerge from September 11, and perhaps the only real 9/11 novel on the list. A New York intellectual is caught in a lie and stranded in his adulterous lover’s apartment by the attacks, which change nothing for him and everything for her.

What’s strange is that, until I read this article I would never have remembered The Emperor’s Children as a 9/11 novel.  I remember it as a typical novel about people who are not from New York but want to be intellectual so they move to New York and meet intellectual, people.  And are still not happy.   But now that I remember that it did involve 9/11, I remember that the most interesting 9/11 part was the character who used 9/11 to escape from New York and start a new life in Florida.   Cruel to his family perhaps, but interesting.   On the whole I didn’t find the novel added anything to my understanding of 9/11 or evoked any particular emotion from me.

I also read Joseph O’Neill’s, Netherland and it left me cold.

A family of three — Dutch-born market analyst, British wife, two-year-old son — are living in a Tribeca loft when the World Trade Center attacks oblige them to find living quarters uptown, where their marriage gradually pulls apart.

The most interesting part of that novel, for me, was the community of cricket players from former British Empire countries.  But I was tired of the morose feel of the novel, especially because the main character could always escape New York in the months after 9/11 by going back to Europe.  So why didn’t he?   I found it a chore to read.

I did generally enjoy Ian McEwan’s, Saturday but that might be because it was a reflection of Europe after 9/11, not America. 

A London neurosurgeon begins his day by watching a plane on fire — a bomb on board, he assumes — and navigates around an anti-Iraq War​ protest to encounter terrorism in his own home.

I still vividly remember the main character in his car trying to avoid the traffic jams from the anti-Iraq War protest.  And I remember the home invasion.   I remember thinking the ending required too much suspending of disbelief, but on the whole I liked it.

The only other book on the list that I’ve read is Jonathan Safran Foer’s​, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I loved it.

A nine year old searches all over New York for the key to his father, who died on September 11.

I remember thinking that Foer had captured something special in that novel: how grief over a death that happens from violence like 9/11 is unique but also completely ordinary. I loved the moment when Oskar blurts out that he wishes it had been his mother who had died and not his father. That moment was so hurtfully real. And it didn’t matter why his father had died.  I loved how Foer intertwined into the novel the story of the bombing of Dresden and the nuclear bombing of Japan to show that no matter how bad 9/11 was, worse things have happened in history.  And worse things have been inflicted by the U.S.  And those events have repercussions through the years. I also liked how Foer mixed graphics, and photos and unique page layouts. I put this novel on a list of books that I wanted to read again in 10 years to see how it would age and if I would still feel the same way about it.  Ironically I only read this novel because it was chosen by my reading group and I didn’t know what it was about.  I would never have chosen it on my own.

And that’s it for the books on the list. I find that I don’t particularly want to read any of the other novels.  Maybe DeLillo’s Falling Man.  But not now.

One novel that was not on the list that left a vivid 9/11 impression on me was John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River.  I can see why it wouldn’t be on a list of 9/11 novels.  It wasn’t about 9/11 or, really, its aftermath.  But one of the events to which the novel builds dramatically happens on 9/11.   As I said, when I blogged about it:

One of the emotional pinnacles of the story just happens to take place on September 11, 2001.   When I first realized that Irving was doing this (which was after the first plane crashed into the tower and a character has the TV on in the kitchen), I was doubtful.  But I think he made it work.    And one reason it works is because the novel isn’t about 9/11, the novel didn’t lead up to 9/11 or away from it.  It just” happened” to happen on the same day as other emotional things happened to the characters.   So the characters had to react to it and they had to react in the context of all the other things that were going on in their lives.

Since that’s the way that many Americans experienced 9/11 it really rang true for me.  Although the whole day remains vivid for me, in actuality I spent much of that day engaged in parts of my ordinary life doing things that had to get done even though a catastrophe had happened 1000 miles away from me.  That’s what Irving captured. 

It doesn’t explain 9/11.  But it reflects how many people experienced 9/11.

The other novel that sticks in my mind that involved 9/11 was The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt, which I loved so much I read in one sitting.  It really isn’t about 9/11 but one of the characters is a little girl who saw the towers fall because she went to school nearby and she is suffering from a type of PTSD.  All of the characters, however, have psychological issues in this novel so she doesn’t particularly stand out because of that.

In the end I don’t know that there ever will be a definitive 9/11 novel.  But there will, I’m sure, be novels that try to make sense of the period that 9/11 will come to represent.  That might be different for different groups of people.  For me, 9/11 stands for the first day in a long slow succession of days in which the people of this country more and more questioned whether they really had enough in common with each other to want to continue to put up with each other.  The day that question is answered is the day that novelists will start trying to make sense of the process using fiction.

Looking for American History

 

“… not all of colonial America was English.”

Matt Yglesias has recently taken to publishing excerpts from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies:  The Settling of North America.  I don’t know if he is currently reading it for the first time or he simply found his old edition on a bookshelf and decided to use excerpts in his blog.  If you haven’t read it, and you are interested in American history, you should pick up a copy. It is well worth your time.

Alan Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 book William Cooper’s Town:  Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. I’ve never had the opportunity to read that history of the father of James Fennimore Cooper and I did not notice when it won the Pulitzer Prize. Alan Taylor was not on my radar the day I was wandering through the history section of Barnes and Noble, looking for a history of North America that wasn’t exclusively an English history.

For reasons too complicated to explain, back around 2003 I found myself needing to learn more about the history of the British West Indies, the German migration to Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s and the colonization of Canada by the French.  I wasn’t sure exactly how much I needed to know and, while  I was prepared to start checking books out of the library, I wasn’t sure where to start.  What I needed was the view from 20,000 feet, a general history of North America that covered all of these geographic areas.  Then I could decide exactly where I would zoom in on. 

My local library branch didn’t have one on its shelves that fit my needs.  The available books were almost completely centered on the 13 colonies, throwing in mentions of Spanish conquistadors and Marquette/Joliet’s exploration of the Mississippi.  There was almost nothing about the West Indies. 

Of course I had access to the entire library system through the card catalog.  But perusing a card catalog is just not the same as paging through actual books to see if they meet your needs.  So I headed to Barnes and Noble sure that it was a waste of time but fully intending to console myself by buying a new novel while I was there.

I wandered through the history section and finally picked up a paperback copy of Alan Taylor’s 2001 book, American Colonies.  I skimmed the introduction:

By long convention, “American history” began in the east in the English colonies and spread slowly westward, reaching only the Appalachian Mountains by the end of the colonial period. According to this view, the “seeds” of the United States first appeared with the English colonists in 1607 in Jamestown in Virginia, followed in 1620 by “the Pilgrims” at Plymouth in New England.  Earlier Spanish and contemporary French settlements were fundamentally irrelevant except as enemies, as “foreign” challenges that brought out the best in the English as they made themselves into Americans. What we now call “the West” did not become part of American history until the United States invaded it during the early nineteenth century.  Alaska and Hawaii made no appearance in national history until the end of that century.

I thought that pretty much summed up history as I had learned it.  But, said Taylor, “the traditional story of American uplift excludes too many people.” 

As I thumbed through the book I realized that it was exactly what I needed.  He said:

Striking a balance between the emerging power of British America and the enduring diversity of the colonial peoples requires bending (but not breaking) the geographic boundaries suggested by the United States today.  Hispanic Mexico, the British West Indies, and French Canada receive more detailed coverage than is customary in a “colonial American history” (which has meant the history of the proto-United States). All three were powerful nodes of colonization that affected the colonists and Indians living between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.  The internal cultures, societies, and economies of the Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies also warrant attention lest they again appear only in wars, reduced to bellicose foils to British protagonists.  Such internal description also affords the comparative perspective needed to see the distinctive nature of British colonial society that made a colonial revolution for independence and republicanism possible first on the Atlantic seaboard.

I bought it on the spot. I read it.  And I regularly go back to it when I need an overview of a certain geographic location at a certain time.  I have blogged about how Winnie the Pooh is a “book of my life” because it affected what I expected from a well written story.  American Colonies is a “book of my life” because it changed how I looked at the history of this country.

The book is divided into three parts.  Part I, “Encounters”, gives a general overview of the pre-European continent and discusses New Spain, the Spanish Frontier and Canada/Iroquoia.  It takes us up to the mid 1650’s.  It is not until Part II, “Colonies”, that we truly meet the British, beginning with the colonization of Virginia and continuing through the colonization of the Chesapeake Colonies, New England, Carolina and the Middle Colonies.  There is a chapter about Puritans and Indians and a whole chapter about the West Indies.   Part III is called “Empires” and it takes us from about 1650 all the way to the Pacific colonization in 1820. It includes good descriptions of French America  and has a nice section on the German migration to Pennsylvania. 

If you want a broad perspective on colonial North America, this is the book for you. For instance, often the importance of the West Indies in colonial life is overlooked other than noting that it was part of the “triangle trade” in slaves.  Taylor spends time on their importance in the British economy.  Thus we understand why, when negotiating the peace treaty after the Seven Years War, the British, who had conquered Canada and the French West Indies, considered “keeping most of the French West Indies and returning Canada.”

Although much smaller, the sugar islands were far more lucrative.  But the influential British West Indian lobby did not want to weaken its advantageous position within the empire by accepting new competition from the more productive plantations on Guadeloupe and Martinique.  The British West Indians lobbied to keep Canada instead. … By taking vast new territories in the Treaty of Paris, the British broke with a previous imperial policy that had sought to maximize maritime commerce while minimizing continental entanglements.  Somehow they would have to raise the money to administer and garrison their expensive new domains in Canada, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and Florida.

My copy is well used at this point.  And over the years, as  I’ve sought out books about specific peoples, places and periods,  I’ve never had reason to think that Taylor got anything wrong in his overview. 

Taylor has a new book out, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.  It is on my to-be-read list, but first I must finish his 2007 book  The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution.  It has been sitting on my shelf for a few years but I finally picked it up this month and am engrossed in it.

But for all around usefulness, and sheer readability, American Colonies can’t be beat and I recommend it.

History is Written by the Victors

On days when I’m disgusted by the avarice, greed, narcissism and selfishness of my fellow Americans I like to remind myself things aren’t worse today than they’ve ever been.  America was born out of selfishness and greed. But they won’t teach you that in schools.

I’m reading Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution and was reminded of this again.  I was also reminded of an online discussion I had a few years ago about a line in the Declaration of Independence accusing King George of “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”   Most Americans don’t know that this refers to the Quebec Act, adopted by Parliament in 1774.  It was meant to resolve the tensions that arose from the British conquest of French North America and help integrate the French Canadians into the British empire. 

Taylor explains:

To please the French Canadians, Parliament endorsed French civil law, protected the Catholic faith, and mandated a provincial government that combined a military governor with an oligarchical council (and without an elected assembly). 

The American colonists were not pleased by this.  Even at this pre-Republic stage in their development the Americans believed that they should be telling people how to live their lives and of course they believed that their way was the best way.  Never mind that the British government had given serious thought as to the best way to integrate Canada into the empire, the American colonists were sure that Parliament was wrong and they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t care about whether the French Canadians were integrated.  After all, they were French.

But the thing that really drove the Americans crazy about the Quebec Act was that it was also intended to protect the rights of the Indians to their lands.  It was a double whammy for the Americans – protecting red skinned people from grasping American land speculators through a plan that also helped people who spoke French.  See?  Things never really change.   

In 1768 Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in North America, had convinced Parliament to create an imaginary line past which settlement would not go.  This would preserve the Indian lands for the Indians, which the British merchants understood was essential to preserving the Fur Trade.  This line cut off the Ohio River Valley from land speculators.  The Quebec Act reinforced this concept by taking away from the colonies any hope of ever controlling the Ohio River Valley because they gave it to Quebec.

Again, Taylor:

The Quebec Act also offended Patriot leaders by extending Quebec’s boundaries south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi, subsuming a vast Indian country coveted by speculators and settlers.  An exasperated Parliament sought to restrain the intruding frontiersmen who provoked so much trouble with the Indians. Governed by the military without an elected assembly, Quebec might protect Indians better than Virginia or Pennsylvania ever had.  In effect, the British expanded Quebec to bolster the boundary for the Indian Country that Sir William had negotiated at Fort Stanwix in 1768. But that expansion alienated powerful colonial politicians who doubled as land speculators, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Yes, the Americans were very unhappy with these new rules and like all Americans who followed them, they simply ignored anything that didn’t fit into their world view.  The Virginians especially.  They entered the Ohio River Valley illegally and provoked conflicts with the Indians there. In fact, things seemed to be heading toward an all out Indian War when Sir William Johnson, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in North America, suddenly died. As with most important points in history, timing is everything and Johnson had very bad timing. At the time of his death he was working with the Mohawks to use their influence to end the Ohio River conflict while he worked the colonial side.  It is unlikely that this plan would have succeeded, but we’ll never know for sure. 

But other things were happening that also affected the Ohio conflicts. 

With the empire in crisis, the timing of Johnson’s death rendered the blow especially ominous.  General Thomas Gage reported:  “I should at all times consider this event as a Publick Loss.  I look upon it as a heavy one at this Juncture, when the frontier People, of Virginia particularly, have taken so much Pains to bring on an Indian War.”  Gage also confronted a virtual collapse of British authority in the colonial seaports, where radical leaders resisted British taxes.  Infuriated by that resistance, Parliament and the Crown resolved to punish Boston by enforcing a blockade with occupying troops commanded by Gage.  That shift withdrew British troops from the troubled frontier in western Pennsylvania, which Indians and settles then drenched in blood.

While I had always known that the American Revolution was not a good thing, in general, for the American Indians I had never before realized that the insurrection in Massachusetts forced the British to withdraw troops from the west who were there to protect the Indians and their land.  If I had thought about it, I might have rationally come to the conclusion that this was inevitable.  But I’d never thought about it.

Over the last few years I’ve read a lot of colonial history and I’ve discovered that I don’t really care for the American colonists all that much.  On some levels they were admirable but on other levels they were abominable.  And, as I continue to read Taylor’s book I find myself wondering what life would have been like if the 13 colonies had lost and the founding fathers had all been hung. 

Snow Day / Reading Day!

I can’t believe how long it has been since I updated this blog.  But today I’m stuck at home in the midst of a snowpocalypse and started thinking about what I’ve been reading lately.  So here is a recap:

Tinkers by Paul Harding.  This small novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year.  I started it last September, taking it along to read in the waiting room on the day I went to get my yearly mammogram.  When I discovered it was about a man who is dying, I decided it wasn’t something I really wanted to read at a cancer screening center so I put it aside.  I didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago and found myself reading it with the sole purpose of finishing it.  ‘nuff said?

The Gifts of Imperfection: Letting go of who you think you’re Supposed to be and embrace who you are, by Brene Brown.   I’m not much into self-help books and this one, I know, reeks of self-helpism.  But Brene Brown gave a lovely speech at TED about her struggle to understand that vulnerability is essential for wholehearted living and I thought “I’d like to read one of her books!”.   So I did.  And for what it is I really enjoyed it.  It isn’t a self-help book in the sense that it doesn’t tell the reader to do any one thing, she talks much about her own struggle to realize her authentic self. 

"I try to make authenticity my number one goal when I go into a situation where I'm feeling vulnerable.  If authenticity is my goal and I keep it real, I never regret it.  I might get my feelings hurt, but I rarely feel shame.  When acceptance or approval becomes my goal, and it doesn't work out, that can trigger shame for me: "I'm not good enough.  If the goal is authenticity and they don't like me, I'm okay.  If the goal is being liked and they don't like me, I'm in trouble.  I get going by making authenticity the priority."

As someone who has had lifelong struggles with self-esteem, I found many of her ideas very useful.

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert.   I enjoyed this story of multi-generations of women, most of whom are confusingly named Dorothy.  The first Dorothy starved herself to death in the fight to give women the vote in Britain.  A later Dorothy engages in civil disobedience in modern day Delaware.  All of the women are trying to find their own place in their worlds.  Walbert crammed a lot of ideas in a small book in which the story is not told chronologically but moves back and forth between the generations.

The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper.   Joe left his hometown behind, shook the dust off his feet and wrote a best-selling novel based on fictitious versions of town characters which was made into a moderately successful movie (starring Leo DiCaprio).  But now Joe’s father is dying and he must return and face the wrath of the townspeople who feel ill-used.   It is a good premise.  Reviews said it was funny.  My book group agreed that was false advertising.  We thought it was sad and we thought Joe was an asshole,  In fact, Joe agrees that he is an asshole. But you know what?  Admitting that you are an asshole doesn’t really make you NOT an asshole.  I suspect that men would like this book more than women.

I’m currently working on Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution and Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Long Song by Andrea Levy  may be my favorite novel of all that I’ve read this year and that is very unexpected.  It is the story of Miss July, who lived in Jamaica in the 1800s first as a slave and then as a free black.  I mostly think of slave novels as “difficult” because of the subject matter.  I also tend to think novels about the West Indian slaves tend to go overboard on the “voodoo” aspects.   I admit that I’m also sometimes suspicious that they are going to be preachy.  So I tend to not pick them up as a first choice.  Then I kick myself when they turn out to be wonderful as, for instance, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is wonderful.

This novel is funny.  Really. 

Levy writes Miss July as having a wonderful sense of humor and lets it come through in the most unexpected circumstances.  She doesn’t shy away from the horrors of slavery.  Miss July is the result of the casual rape of her mother by the overseer of Amity Plantation in Jamaica.  Miss July is casually taken away from her mother by the sister of the plantation owner, almost as a pet would be taken.  Miss July witnesses murder and other horrors.  She has children she must give up willingly and unwillingly.  And yet she is a survivor and her sense of humor is part of her survival instinct.

I really liked the structure of this novel.  The story is told from three points of view, although two points of view are from the same person and yet are different.  First, there is Miss July’s son, Thomas Kinsman, who is a publisher and who encourages his mother to write her story.  He provides the Introduction and also jumps in with a few editorial comments.  Then Miss July tells the story, writing in the third person.  But she also jumps in with first person interpolation, addressing us as “reader” and explaining the arguments she is having with her son.  It all works.

Another reason it works is that Miss July treats all of the people in her story, black or white, irreverently while, at the same time, taking her story very seriously.  By walking the fine line of caricature with all of her characters, Levy solves the problem of trying to explain the motivations of a large and diverse cast of characters.  They do what they do because they are who they are – it is as simple as that.

The one thing that is abundantly clear, though, is the corrupting influence of slavery.   There are no good characters because no one can be good in this environment.  Good men are corrupted.  Even Miss July is appalled and indignant to find that her “worth” is not more than the worth of the kitchen maid.

It might sound odd to say that a novel about the harshness of slavery is funny and that it works.  But over the past few years I’ve read a number of non-fiction books about life on the English Sugar Islands of the West Indies during the 18th and 19th century.  None of them captured the absurdity of the situation for all involved as well as this novel did.

Books of my Life: AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh

The Guardian had a series of podcasts called “Books of My Life” in which they interviewed famous people (mostly writers I think) and asked about the “books of their lives”.  At about the same time I started listening to this series of podcasts I also got an iPad and downloaded the free iBook app.  One free book comes with the app and that is AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.  I was virtually thumbing through it, looking at the pictures, and I thought “This is a book of my life.”

When I was a child my sister received a full set of AA Milne books and, at about the same time, acquired a set of records in which a British man read them aloud.  I have no idea who the man was.  Probably some famous British actor but, as a child, names meant nothing to me.  I don’t remember either my sister nor I picking up the AA Milne books and reading them but we listened to that record over and over.  I can still hear his baritone voice:

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin.  It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.  And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.  Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you.  Winnie-the-Pooh.”

There was a time in my life when I probably knew the short story in Chapter One, “We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin,” by heart.  I probably could still tell you that entire story very close to word-for-word.   Eventually, when I was older I read all of the AA Milne.  I still sometimes give the original Winnie-the-Pooh books as baby gifts in the hope that, eventually, the small children will grow into the stories. 

Chapter One of Winnie-the-Pooh shaped my expectations of what a good work of fiction should be.  Winnie-the-Pooh was more than a story book.  Oh, sure, there were stories.   In Chapter One Winnie-the-Pooh decides to try to steal some honey from the bees he discovers living in a tree.  He comes up with a plan that involves floating up in the air under a balloon so that he can reach the honey.  He enlists the help of his friend, Christopher Robin, who is doubtful about the plan but helps out anyway.  In the end the plan fails.   My first encounter with a non-happy ending.  Not a tragic ending, but not a typical American ending where everyone gets what they want.

AA Milne created a world that was imaginable but wasn’t too full  of detail.  We know that the story takes place in a forest and that one day Winnie-the-Pooh “came to an open place in the middle of the forest”.  We know that Christopher Robin lives “behind a green door in another part of the forest.”  But we are never overwhelmed with detail.  And if I imagined a Missouri forest rather than an English forest, it didn’t matter.

AA Milne created real, living characters for Winnie-the-Pooh, even if he took his inspiration from his small son and his collection of stuffed animals. He invested his characters with depth without ever having to describe that depth.  We learn about Pooh Bear from his what he says and what he does.  We learn about Christopher Robin from what he says and what he does.

But none of this is completely out-of-the ordinary in children’s books.  The Madeleine books certainly had simple stories, just-enough description and vivid characters.  Milne did something that was a revelation to me as a child.  In Chapter One he told two stories simultaneously.  The main story is the story of Pooh Bear and the honey bees.  But the Bee Story is a story within a story.  It is wrapped up in a story of a man telling his little boy a goodnight story.  There is an “outer story” and an “inner story”.   The little boy, Christopher Robin,  comes downstairs, dragging his bear behind him, and says “What about a story?”  The father, AA Milne, complies and tells a story about Christopher Robin’s bear in which a further fictionalized Christopher Robin makes an appearance. 

This is something that parents do all the time, tell stories to their children in which the children are characters.  Children love that.  What I loved as a child and as an adult about Chapter One of Winnie-the-Pooh is that AA Milne told both stories at a level that children could understand even though he used two “voices” and the “audience” for the two stories is different.  The inner story-within-a story is directed at a “you'” who is the Christopher Robin of the outer story.  The “you” to whom the outer story is directed is the reader.   As a child I completely understood this.  As an adult I marvel that AA Milne could make children understand this.  Here, he is talking to the “you” who is the reader.

When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, “But I thought he was a boy?”

“So did I,” said Christopher Robin.

“Then you can’t call him Winnie?”

“I don’t.”

“But you said –“

“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh.  Don’t you know what “ther” means?”

“A, yes, now I do,” I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.

In AA Milne’s world, readers (even childish readers) live on the adult side and are talked to as adults.  Adults either must know everything or must pretend to know everything.  The inner story-within-a story is told to a child and children are not barred from asking the obvious questions, even if the adults have to make up the answer:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.

(“What does ‘under the name’ mean? asked Christopher Robin.

“It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.”

“Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t quite sure,” said Christopher Robin.

“Now I am,” said a growly voice.

“Then I will go on,” said I.”)

The Christopher Robin in the outer story is a boy described to us the reader and is just a little boy.  Here Winnie-the-Pooh has fallen into a gorse-bush:

He  crawled out of the gorse-bush, brushed the prickles from his nose, and began to think again.  And the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin.

(“Was that me?” said Christopher Robin in an awed voice, hardly daring to believe it.

“That was you.”

Christopher Robin said nothing, but his eyes got larger and larger, and his face got pinker and pinker.”)

The Christopher Robin in the inner story is still a boy but is invested with much more sophistication than the real Christopher Robin, as befits a character in a story.   Here Winnie-the-Pooh has put his plan into action and has rolled himself in mud in the hope of looking like a small, black cloud in a blue sky.  He has then floated upward holding onto the balloon:

“Hooray!” you shouted.

“Isn’t that fine?” shouted Winnie-the-Pooh down to you.  “What do I look like?”

“You look like a Bear holding on to a balloon,” you said.

“Not—“ said Pooh anxiously,”—not like a small black cloud in a blue sky?”

“Not very much.”

And of course the more sophisticated Christopher Robin would not have gone for a walk in the English woods without taking his gun with him (in the pictures it is a hunting type of gun with a pop cork on a string hanging from it) which comes in handy when he has to shoot the balloon so that Winnie-the-Pooh can get down. Of course he misses the first time and grazes Pooh Bear.  The more sophisticated Christopher Robin just simply says “I’m so sorry” but the child Christopher Robin of the outer story is troubled by this:

Christopher Robin gave a deep sigh, picked his Bear up by the leg, and walked off to the door, trailing Pooh behind him.  At the door he turned and said, “Coming to see me have my bath?”

I might,” I said.

“I didn’t hurt him when I shot him, did I?”

“Not a bit.”

He nodded and went out, and in a moment I heard Winnie-the-Pooh – bump – bump – bump -  going up the stairs behind him.

This is a sophisticated structure for a children’s story.  It’s a sophisticated structure to pull off in an adult short story.   As a child I didn’t overtly wonder why AA Milne chose to tell the story this way.  I understood that he was accomplishing something by doing it this way but I never thought to ask myself what he had hoped to accomplish.  But it made me take sophisticated structures for granted.  To this day, I’m never completely satisfied with a novel or a short story that just wants to tell a tale or give me well-drawn characters.  I can enjoy them but I’m never really satisfied. 

I’m only satisfied if there is a good tale with well drawn characters and a complicated structure.  Then I’m in heaven.  And I blame AA Milne for that.