Category Book reviews

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck – a book review

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Published in 1945, Cannery Row breaks with Steinbeck’s earlier models in that it is a series of sometimes disconnected stories, rather than a cohesive narrative with an obvious story arc. At first glance it appears to be a very dense novel of allegory and tenderness, looking like another story of a dissolute group of men. They’re slightly devious, definitely unreliable  and all of them victims of something: a physically abusive wife, frustrated ambitions, laziness and alcohol. Cannery Row looks like it’s a tale of male friendship and yet it is not. The women have their own cohorts: the women working for Dora the local madam and the middle class busy bodies who try to exert power over the bars and brothel. As with Tortilla Flat the author is showing us an Arthurian allegory, based on life in a particular locale. He presents the bit of Monterey, California where the daily sardine catches are processed and canned in dedicated canning factories. This part of Monterey is long since gone: Cannery Row drifted into redundancy due to overfishing and now it’s a tourist destination.

The Cannery Row of 1943 as John Steinbeck tells it, is home to a group of apparently decadent characters: “the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junkheaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses”. In his novel’s first paragraph John Steinbeck tells us what to expect of his novel. In telling us this, Steinbeck’s opening paragraphs are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s prologues to Romeo and Juliet and Henry V. We’re told the set up.

Steinbeck’s story progresses slowly and he explores his themes through different narratives. Money is a big deal. And death and rebirth. Then there is love and kindness and of course human frailty. In a letter to his friend Carlton A. Sheffield in September 1944 just after Steinbeck had finished Cannery Row, he says he wrote the book with four levels. Tantalisingly he doesn’t say what those levels are, but I think he means as a simple set of stories, as an allegory, as a picture of Cannery Row and as an antedote to war. Despite its creation date (he began the book in 1943), there are no references to World War II at all in Cannery Row. The only military reference is the dawn walk of a pair of soldiers with their girlfriends, welcoming the rising sun: “… and the men lay down and put their heads in the girls’ laps and looked up into their faces. And they smiled at each other, a tired and peaceful and wonderful secret.” Beauty not destruction, even though the men are soldiers.

So what is this short novel about? First of all money. When Mack and the boys embark on an expedition to collect a few hundred frogs that Doc, owner of the marine biology lab, will sell on, they have no money for fuel. Nor do they have a vehicle. They persuade local grocer Lee Chong to let them take his derelict car which he got in return for clearing a groceries debt. The truck doesn’t go and of course it has no fuel. Doc arranges for fuel and the boys fix the truck up well enough to get to the place where there are lots of frogs. Except the truck’s frailties are such that it can only get up hills, if it is in reverse. After several mishaps, including one of the boys ending up in jail, they have their frogs. They return triumphant to Cannery Row and throw a party for Doc in his lab. Doc arrives home long after his party is over, his lab trashed and the frogs escaped to local culverts, ponds and streams. But in between the boys arriving home triumphant with their frogs and the ill-fated party, the frogs have become a trading currency in the neighbourhood. No winners where financial greed is concerned. The boys throw another party for Doc and this one he does make and enjoy, despite the second party ending up much like the first.

And then there’s death. No Steinbeck story would be complete without a violent death. In Cannery Row it comes early with the suicide of a local man indebted to Lee Chong. By handing over an abandoned building he owns in Cannery Row before blowing his brains out, the man settles his debt to the grocer. The boys suggest that the building is in need of protection from vandals and fire, so they should stay there for a nominal rent. This is never paid, but the boys move in and turn the old fishmeal store into a home they call the Palace Flophouse. Death and rebirth.

A little glimpse into the life of a gopher flips this around. A whole chapter is dedicated to a gopher, sleek and handsome and in the prime of life. He diligently builds a home for his mate who never materialises, even though his burrow “was a place where he could settle down and raise any number of families and the burrow could increase in all directions”. Eventually he gives up, abandons his lofty palace and moves to a nearby garden known for putting out lethal gopher traps. Death finds us all. Doc exploring Pacific tide pools discovers the body of a lovely young woman “wedged between two rocks”. He chooses to not claim the bounty: “will you report it? I’m not feeling well,” he tells another man on the beach.

Love and kindness are common themes in the work of John Steinbeck and in Cannery Row it’s part of almost every subplot. Lee Chong is generous and patient with people he knows are out to rip him off or steal from him. When he’s persuaded to lend the Mack and the boys his truck: “Lee was worried but couldn’t see any way out. The dangers were there and Lee knew all of them. ‘Okay, ’ said Lee”. Doc’s endless patience with the boys even though he knows there’s an agenda somewhere. Between shifts, the women of the Bear Flag brothel take soup out to local people ill with the ’flu. Despite the exhuberant trashing of his lab, Doc helps cure Mack’s puppy of distemper. Having noticed that he only has a grubby blanket for his bed, the whores sew a quilt for Doc’s birthday. The cruelties in the book, such as the likely fate of Frankie, a mentally frail young boy, are necessary counterpoints to these and many other expressions of love.

Human frailty and agency in all their manifestations permeate Steinbeck’s work and especially Cannery Row. Every decision we make or avoid has consequences, from drinking too much to not drinking enough. In Cannery Row, everyone’s choices are resolved one way or another, from Lee Chong’s greed and willingness to accept frogs as money, through to Frankie’s theft of a $50 clock and subsequent arrest. 

In less than 40,000 words of dazzling prose there is all this and much more. Cannery Row is short but it’s extremely dense, and that’s the novel’s power. Brevity masks the hugeness of story telling that makes Cannery Row an intensely powerful novel, both in its own time and for our own.

A book review: Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (published 1935)

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

Written forever ago describing places and people that can no longer exist in America, and yet so very contemporary. Reviews of Tortilla Flat have been coming out off and on for nearly one hundred years. I haven’t read any of them, but surely they also say that this short novel harbingers the Steinbeck of Nobel and Pulitzer. In Tortilla Flat we can already hear Steinbeck fast becoming a master craftsman. He’s only 33 years old but his authorial voice is loud and clear. Tortilla Flat is an early work, barely a novella and in this book Steinbeck flexed muscle and bone as hard as his Tortilla Flat characters avoid doing so. You could read it as a mysoginistic series of gruff clichés, except that the male friendship group Steinbeck describes is so tenderly drawn and they are such lovers and respecters of women. Or maybe they just fear them? Steinbeck’s female characters have such agency, even Señora Cortez who is barely 25 and has 9 children. She’s not entirely sure why and doesn’t much care who the fathers are. She and her mother thrive and her children are healthy and strong.

Tortilla Flat isn’t a single narrative but a series of little tales, written pictures, whatever you want to call them. John Steinbeck doesn’t be doing with the show don’t tell school of writing so championed by Ernest Hemingway. Steinbeck’s characters don’t need to be shown because his loving portrayals tell us who they are, he describes them so tenderly, so beautifully. And anyway I think the show don’t tell thing is a feint for writers too scared to let their imaginations loose on character. No risk of that with Steinbeck.

Tortilla Flat is set just after the first world war. It’s a series of windows we look through into other peoples’ lives. The lives we’re shown are those of a group of paisanos living in the hills behind Monterey, California. A muddle of Mexican and Italian, paisanos are the people of Tortilla Flat, liiving in their own, separate community. The paisanos live on the edge of a remote blob of America. Their world is anchored and yet separate, a collection of disparities that’s what made America America in the early 20th century. Tortilla Flat is one of countless communities that look to their common interest but only loosely connect themselves to others and no one much bothers. The sense of federation is far away and the government some remote entity that has little to do with day to day existence, day to day survival. 

In 1935 when the book was published America was recovering from a remote war that touched its local worlds from a great distance. An abstraction only made real when American soldiers came back, or didn’t. Several of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat are war veterans who came home to nothing and drift back into lifestyles of indolence and grift with no complaints and no expectation for much of anything. They live in the woods, on the beach, go with women as it suits. Upon his return from the war Danny discovers that he has inherited two houses in Tortilla Flat. The first one almost immediately catches fire and burns down. The second one Danny moves into along with a couple of his friends who share his lifestyle and values. They gradually accommodate more friends, a bunch of dogs and spend their time telling stories on the sun-warmed porch, and working out how best to get the next gallon of wine and something to eat. Occasionally they go with local women who just as occasionally decide they are in need of a man for a night or two. Chickens go missing and other peoples’ goats get milked. Children are fed and lovers wax and wane.

The story is not so much story as a space Steinbeck creates through the intense interiority of his characters. What a word. I mean that Steinbeck tells you what characters think, why they think as they do, their subtle and sincere rationales for their actions. Pilon, the logician and rationalist, cares only about what makes most sense to achieve his goals with the minimal moral compromise. And he considers the implications of actions and inactions, mostly concluding that he should do as he wants because his motivations and expectations are pure. In the movie of Tortilla Flat Spencer Tracey portrays Pilon as a bit of a rogue, trying to make him lovable but conniving. It doesn’t much work and I don’t think he hit his mark at all. Pilon is, as all the friends are, roguish in his way. But he has a deep sense of connection to those he cares about, especially to Danny. Danny is best described as feckless, a little thick and more concerned with his next thrill than anything else. But Pilon does care, he isn’t just a devious idler a “cunning mixture of good and evil”. All this Steinbeck tells us so beautifully: “Pilon was a lover of beauty and a mystic. He raised his face into the sky and his soul arose out of him into the sun’s afterglow …that Pilon was beautiful, and his thoughts were unstained with selfishness and lust.” 

These men are heroes in their world, champions for each other in word and deed, like medieval knights. They are not at all bothered with the urgencies of facing life’s challenges. Poverty or dispossession are not feared and these men are not pathetic curiosities. These men care about very little and their lives are shaped by small and easily satisfied wants: enough to eat, enough wine to drink, enough love, the occasional fight. We learn humility reading this book so long after it was written and in a world that is so very far from the gentle one Steinbeck shares. The love for that world and those people shines through every line.

Tortilla Flat is a masterclass in fiction writing and it has every marker for what John Steinbeck would come to be most associated with: the wonder of our everyday ordinariness, the need for kindness, survival and our responsibilities to one another and to our world. 

The Last Chairlift by John Irving – a review

Laurel Lindström 4 Comments

John Irving is about as lofty as it gets when we think of modern American novelists. Lauded for The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire, Irving has penned 15 novels and scads of other writings including screenplays during a career that spans over five decades. Not all of his work has been celebrated and some of it is borderline impenetrable. A Son of the Circus anyone? That novel goes well with tea and chocolate and was the most recent Irving I had read before tackling The Last Chairlift. I say tea and chocolate because A Son of the Circus is such a mess of a novel, that a reader requires sustenance throughout. Chocolate necessity. There is much the same sensation with The Last Chairlift although there is far less excitement in this latest (2022) work.

The Last Chairlift is the story of Adam Brewster who’s mother is a ski instructor. Little Ray lives away from her son for six months of the year, while she’s working and living at a ski resort with her partner, Molly. Adam’s grandmother, who reads him Moby-Dick (all of it), takes care of him when Little Ray’s not around. Adam grows up missing his mother when she’s away and being doted on by her whenever she’s around. They are in love from the start. Adam’s close to his cousin Nora and her girlfriend Em who are some six years older than Adam. When Adam is around 14, Little Ray marries an English teacher, Elliot Barlow. A snowshoeing enthusiast and cross dresser Adam has met and introduced Mr Barlow to his mother. At their wedding in Little Ray’s and Adam’s childhood home Adam’s grandfather standing naked in the rain is killed by a lightening strike. He haunts the house. There are other ghosts, mostly from the Hotel Jerome in Aspen Colorado where Adam was conceived, but this isn’t a proper ghost story. The ghosts might be metaphorical ones. Little Ray doesn’t share Adam’s paternity details with him or anyone else. The boy’s got a mildly obsessive interest in his father’s identity; it gets more persistent as Adam gets older. All the other loving and supportive members of his family want to know too, but no one really sweats it. The truth comes out eventually and doesn’t really matter that much. What matters is that Adam is deeply loved by a collection of wonderful people who enrich his life story and sense of personal affirmation.

Over the course of 889 densely typeset pages we share in the evolving relationships of these closely bonded characters, plus a mass of other mostly uninteresting ones. There are just too many people in The Last Chairlift to keep caring about, or to try to keep in mind in case they pop up again around about page 765 or wherever. Popping up again is what you expect but what often doesn’t happen. This is why chocolate has to be close to hand. Consolation or distraction. Most of the extra characters are props for a lazy rather than meticulous plotline, or they’re convenient devices to drive the plot along. Most never reappear. It’s in part why this novel feels so baggy, unedited, random. Add in the fitness, obsessions with smallness, the mock screenplays, the ghosts with so much volition and personality, the wrestling and Moby-Dickreferences; it’s an exhausting mess.

Or it’s a life that we’re participating in; the unsketched reader’s just another of the outcasts Irving celebrates in these and other pages. The Last Chairlift celebrates its outcasts as sexual variables, yet we get no insight as to what makes people want to do what they want to do to each other. Nor do we learn more about how they decide who it is that turns them on, or who they would like to turn on. Is any of it a decision? So far so normal. For bog standard heterosexuals this is a constant conundrum within and beyond their own tribe. It’s probably the same for the nonbogstandard ones too, as well as the rest. Independent of tribe, what’s the intangible we all miss? Why isn’t it enough that to love is enough? What conflates peoples’ sexuality and sense of identity? The Last Chairlift offers no hints or revelations, apart from the love thing. “There are more ways of loving.” It’s fine to parade a cohort of alternatives, but is it fine for an author to offer no interiority for his or her characters? In 350,000 words, there surely should be room for more nuance and expression of persona.

It’s safe to say that if this book had landed on a publisher’s desk without the John Irving moniker it would have been unceremoniously rejected. At over 350,000 words there are far too many of them used to tell the basic story of Little Ray and Adam and their loved ones. The text is well bogged down with repetitions, reminders, cop-outs and the use of screenplay formatting, a complex clutter of what is essentially a lazy and unfocused narrative. But maybe that’s deliberate. One of the repetitions throughout this novel is that fiction is tidy, but that life’s storylines are messy. Irving’s way of presenting this may be more dumpling than soufflé but the point is clear. One way to consider this novel is as roughly autobiographical; it includes all the usual Irving tropes: an abundance of semicolons, writing chat, politics, wrestling, personal alienation, relationship overdosing, films and movie stars, New Hampshire and New York City, sexual awakening, sexual minority, sexual expression, sexual dysfunction and überfunctioning, sex in whatever manner you fancy. As the novel grinds interminably on, sex as Irving’s obsession dribbles ever slower, ever more passively. Perhaps this is what happens to men, or this man, slipping into a ninth decade. Other things become more important, like how we care for each other and all the other ways there are to love. And where I left my slippers. 

This book is easy to judge based on its plot (check) and characters (too many, but check), but less easy to consider based on what it is about. It isn’t really about what it says on the back cover: those two paragraphs cover incidences in the book, But those incidents are among many and although they might be triggers for wider themes, those events aren’t important. There’s just so much going on in this novel, but mostly it’s about John Irving. If you’re a John Irving fan get stuck in and wallow with him a (long) while. If not read Moby-Dick instead.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus – a review

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

This book has already been widely reviewed by the professional reviewing community. But I bought my copy and want to tell you why you should do the same.

This is an astonishing debut novel, but its slickness and technical competence probably reflect the fact that the author has many years as a copywriter under her belt. That said there is nothing hackneyed or formulaic about the writing. It’s compelling, sophisticated, complex and loaded with stuff to make you think. The protagonist Elizabeth Zott is a chemist who falls in love, does not marry, loses her lover but gains their child. She’s obsessed with rowing and cooking and ends up hosting a cooking show on television that becomes hugely successful to everyone’s surprise.

But that is in the sixties and Zott’s story begins in the fifties at a research facility where everyone envies this beautiful, committed and gifted woman. Other women at the place are jealous and conniving, and groping by male colleagues is de rigeur, in line with the times. Being old myself I am familiar with the trope although in my case it was the seventies rather than the fifties and by the seventies men were a little less obvious in their abuses. It is still a common if even less overt occurence. And people still do their best to thwart a woman’s progress especially if she is pretty and unconventional as Elizabeth Zott is. A belief persists that if one is pretty one should a) expect uninvited sexual attention and b) not bother with a career because being pretty means one doesn’t need to. It’s a mentality that is still deeply ingrained and not just amongst men.

Setting her story in the fifties and sixties allows Garmus to illustrate with sharp focus a serious problem that persists to this day. Only by bringing it into stark and shocking contrast can we all address it, especially the men who still don’t get the point of why women want to be treated as equals. Women are still categorised according to their appearance and attitude, not just by men for whom there isn’t the same depth of problem. The truism runs deepest in the male psyche, especially in that of the chivalrous and charming ones. Most of them so miss the point and the ones who don’t are in denial. The ones who persist with being charming and chivalrous and do get the point are the keepers. But they are admittedly rare.

Elizabeth Zott is necessarily an extreme character. She responds to every situation with varying degrees of detachment based on what she observes and her understanding of it. She refuses to play the role society has assigned because it hasn’t occurred to her that she has a predefined role. She’s been incidental and not central in her own life’s story, so she has no reason or space for self-doubt. She doesn’t even consider that she’s being difficult and unexpected because she’s not. Zott’s being honest, unfiltered and truthful, true to herself and we could do with more women like her. Zott is a full-on distillation of femininity, independent objectivity, integrity and intuitive intelligence. She is also intensely warm, passionate and loving. She is deeply touched by consistently bizarre tragedies and loss. She is consistently cheated and molested by colleagues, but allows none of it to pollute her sense of self or truth.

As the book progresses we learn more about Zott’s bizarre back-story and that of her lover, chemist and potential Nobel candidate, Calvin Evans. The book just gets more and more compelling so it becomes necessary to take a break from the narrative and set the book down. You realise that you are absolutely loving the characters and that the novel’s gripping pace is taking you too quickly to the end. I had to put Lessons in Chemistry aside at least twice because I didn’t want it to end. And I wanted to think of ways in which the many narrative strands would be resolved. There was no great and unexpected twist at the end, but the end did come far too suddenly. This was the only flaw in an otherwise immaculate reading experience.

A helpful editor should have pointed out to Bonnie Garmus that there needed to be about twice the scene setting and at least double the story telling for that final chapter. It really should have been spread over a couple of chapters to be consistent with the rhythm of the earlier parts of the book. But what do I know. Maybe other readers would also have appreciated more emotional expurgation from these newly explored late-comers. Maybe other readers would also want a deeper examination of their emotional responses and some sense of what happens next in their lives. It was all a bit too rushed for me, but read the book yourself and see what you think. Oh and I would love to know what the chemical notation on the tombstone says.

Traitor King by Andrew Lownie – a review

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Much has been written about the dreadful antics of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. So much so that according to Andrew Lownie, the author of Traitor King, it was difficult to get reviewers to read and review his latest book. This might be because they believe, wrongly, that there is nothing new to add to the well trodden territory that has seen some fifty titles about the notorious couple. Or it might be that literary editors and reviewers are too lazy to want to learn more about them. But learning more is what Traitor King is all about: it’s new territory presented in eensy weensy detail.

The book covers the years following King Edward VIII’s abdication, his marriage to Wallis Simpson and their dubious career as celebrity royals. Much as seems to be happening with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex today, the Windsors went to immense effort to earn a very juicy living by exploiting their non-roles. No longer part of the monarchy, they continued to live the lifestyle that Edward had enjoyed prior to his new life with Wallis, except that he wasn’t king anymore. They married in 1937 as soon as her divorce from her second husband was finalised and spent the rest of their lives as glamourous nomads, mostly in Europe and often at the expense of others.

They did a stint in the Bahamas, then a British Crown Colony, where Edward was put out of harm’s way during World War II. At least that was Winston Churchill’s intention. But corruption, scandal and murder attended the Windsors’ time in the sun. Edward’s deficit of grey matter was a serious impediment when it came to making sensible choices, no matter how obvious they were. Mrs Windsor did at least make an effort in the Bahamas and got involved in good works to the benefit of the islanders. But the local murder of Harry Oakes, a British gold miner, tax exile and close friend of the Duke of Windsor, was never solved and the Duke was directly involved in the haphazard investigation into the death. In Traitor King Lownie presents compelling evidence that Windsor was implicated in Harry Oakes’ demise.

Churchill had sent the pair away for several reasons, but mainly to keep them out of range of the throne. This sounds outlandish but the close connections between the Windsors and the Nazis was more than a mere sharing of ideologies. It was easy to flatter Wallis and Edward with promises of wealth and power, as neither was politically astute. It was even easier to appeal to their shared vanity with a promise to reinstate Edward as the King of England, with Wallis as his queen once Germany had vanquished Great Britain.

Edward and Wallis were obvious security risks although much of the evidence for the gravity of the risk has only recently come to light. Sitting at the heart of the diplomatic circles in various European capitals, Edward was well-placed to keep up to date with developments as the war progressed. Unfortunately he was keen to brag over dinner about what he heard, regardless of its sensitivity and security implications. He professed he wanted to help and he craved position for most of his life. During the war, got only a token position as a military liaison official where he could do the least harm.

Wallis was known to have had Nazi sympathies and it turns out that before the war she had had an affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop. From 1938 to 1945 he was the Nazi’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. Does that title scream spymaster or what? As far as Wallis was concerned he lived up to his title. She had become of interest to intelligence services in the USA and elsewhere and a recently disclosed FBI report states that “because of her high official position, the duchess is obtaining a variety of information concerning the British and French activities that she is passing on to the Germans.”Once married to Edward the pair were targets for the British and French intelligence services as well. The 1937 tour of Germany and meeting Hitler and his odious crew didn’t help matters and nor did Edward’s close family connections in Germany. 

In 1940 the Germans set up Operation Willi, a pretty half-hearted effort to kidnap the couple. This was another reason to get the Windsors out of Europe. In the Bahamas they continued to be annoying, hobnobbing with known Nazi sympathisers and getting involved in what appears to be money laundering and currency gambles. Money was very important to the Windsors although they appear to have been takers more than givers.

Andrew Lownie documents all this and much more in granular detail. At times his book reads as if it were an elaborated list of every interaction the Windsors had with a vast miscellany of people as documented in security reports, sales catalogues, travel documents, letters and diaries. Lownie has scoured the planet for any references to the Windsors in the biographies, letters and diaries of their friends, colleagues, servants, guests, business partners and hangers on. This data overwhelm creates a tension with the book’s narrative flow and the drumbeat of meticulously documented facts too often drowns out the author’s voice. Bolder opinions on the facts presented would have made for a more compelling storyline and an easier read.

Traitor King doesn’t really hit its stride until the final quarter. By this time its 1953 and the couple is settling down in Paris where they continue to entertain on a grand scale and Edward is still trying to get his family to be nice to Wallis. That never happens and after his death in May 1972 Wallis lives on for another 14 years, still exiled, depressed and unloved. In her final days parasites posing as aides sell off her belongings and she is confined to her bedroom waiting to die. 

It’s all very sad, but although love was the reason for Edward’s abdication, love seems not to have been at the heart of the Windsors’ relationship. That is even sadder. He worshipped his idealised version of her and she treated him with condescension and distain. Ambition, greed, vanity, platforming, ostentatiousness, all ooze from these two people even at such a distance. They are odious individuals, selfish, mean and competitive narcissists of limited intelligence and perception. Beyond the romance that persistently overshadows the human reality Andrew Lownie’s book, with all its details, shows us the pair for who they really were.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting by Penelope Mortimer – A review

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

This book was originally published in 1958, but it’s a story we should all revisit. Not that Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is peerless prose or a wild tale of derring-do. It is neither. Rather, this book is a glimpse of a place in time where men and women were on the edge of massive, generational change.

The approaching transition was from the cosy but fragile reality of the traditional, nuclear family to something much edgier. In this new something people divorced without stigma, lived together without being married and sat on each other’s laps in public. Women were on the verge of all the freedoms that sheer tights, short skirts and the contraceptive pill conferred. They were ready to turn away from conventional social constrictions and personal repression, towards something much more dangerous and risky. 

But in 1958 that was all yet to come. Postwar 1950s Britain was still a seriously limited world, a world where rationing hadn’t finished until 1954 and where Hitler’s ghost still cast a long and menacing shadow. People were subdued and passive, locked in the same class cage as before the war. With Naziism defeated the only war they faced was the Cold War, something too abstractly horrific to truly get their heads around. In this fifties world people clung to traditional roles, to old and dessicated habits because anything different or new was too terrifying. The thought of any kind of upheaval or change was direct trauma.

For most people, ideas that there could be alternatives to pre-war expectations, to new freedoms and roles, had an irrational power to instill fear. It was just too much to think about. Read the novels of Kingsley Amis and the poetry of Philip Larkin and amidst the brilliance you read a celebration of the ordinary and the pre-war status quo. Popular stories, novels and plays were about the quotidien, the unquestionable joys of the steady and reliable British routine. And we had a burgeoning of fantasies and escapism like The Borrowers and the Lord of the Rings presenting alternative safe presentations of struggle and triumph, to replace the horrors of war that had been on the doorstep.

Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting does none of this, but it does challenge the cosiness of the ordinary lives people were encouraged to live and any escapist fantasies they might have had. The decade was marked by economic growth and technological advance. Economic growth made the life of a housewife more exciting because she could shop at will for household appliances and stuff for herself and her family. Technology made life more convenient; television added scope for idle entertainment. But such advances also encouraged people, especially women, to question shifting individual expectations. They wanted to better understand what it means to have a fulfilled life and how to go about having one.

Penelope Mortimer’s Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is clearly drawn from her own life’s experience as a wife, mother and housewife, and of her own frustrated intellect. In sparse and economical prose she presents a middle-class, white family living in what would once have been described as the stockbroker belt. Ruth and Max  Whiting have three children, two pre-teen boys who go to boarding school and an older daughter in her first year at Oxford. An unplanned but approaching birth is the reason for the daughter’s parent’s marriage in the first place, although Angela doesn’t know this. Angela thinks she’s in love and then she too falls pregnant. The young man in question is a carbon copy of her father at about the same age and situation in life.

Abortion wasn’t an option for Ruth and Max, but it has become unquestionably possible for Angela and Tony, even though it’s still illegal. This odious young man has contrived a personna of male authority, hiding his selfish and sleazy character without even a smidge of awareness that he is doing so. He has no moral compass, no sympathy for his girlfriend, no question of any response other than minimising his culpability. All this is carefully hidden behind a mimicry of traditional expectations of male behaviour, bluster and the puerile affectations of youth. That he wants to live up to the responsibility for getting himself and Angela out of a dreadful situation is fine in theory. But as he acts out the part, he lacks the moral courage or even the slenderest shred of nerve to face the horror of the proposed solution. Or its cost. In this regard perhaps not much has changed since the fifties.

But Ruth has been there before and can understand what needs doing, although how to do it is a harder problem. Her daughter’s child, although it will be aborted, becomes fictionalised in Ruth’s imagination. These imaginings are proxies for Ruth’s own future, although she wants to believe that the child will never be born. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting takes its name from the nursery rhyme which plays on a tiny music box, Ruth has bought for a neighbour’s little girl. She decides to keep it and it becomes a talisman, a reference throughout the novel for Ruth’s need for something reliable and consistent. A bit like how women are these days with their mobile ’phones, the music box gives her something tangible, a reference point. It’s a reminder to keep her feet on the planet. Solving the pregnancy problem for Angela and imagining her unborn child’s fictitious life, together jolt Ruth forwards so she appears to slowly move away from her own nervous collapse. 

Nervous collapse was hidden too in the fifties, just like abortion, poverty, failure, affairs. Many of these are still hidden along with anything else that could be considered embarrassing or in need of response. But people today have far higher trust that their frailties might be accepted, their expectations realised. They have far more routes and support for resolutions and towards achieving their goals. Opportunities to express oneself through words, images, sound and any other form of narrative one might think of abound. The internet fuels a perennial explosion of ideas, expressions and opinions, reverberating endlessly, every moment of every day. Central to this inexhaustible supply of content is an obsession with self and individual identity, with the desperate need to express a unique persona and universal validity. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is a reminder that such luxuries are relatively new for most ordinary people and especially that they have been very, very hard won. We, men, women and other, have travelled a massive journey and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting shows us a tiny bend in a very long road. That’s why we should read this book again.

Constance Wilde’s Autograph Book edited by Devon Cox

Laurel Lindström Leave a comment

Constance Wilde, born in 1858, was the wife of Oscar and the mother of his two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Two years after her marriage to Oscar Wilde in 1884, Constance started an autograph book for which she continued to collect entries until 1896. There are 62 in all, mostly provided by invited contributors during Constance’s At Home events. But by 1896, her husband was in prison having been convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and Constance was in exile in Italy. After Constance died in 1898, two years before Oscar, the whereabouts of the autograph book were unknown. 

It resurfaced at auction in 1987 and Mary Hyde bequeathed it to the British Museum in 2003. The British Museum kindly gave the Oscar Wilde Society permission to produce a facsimilie reproduction of the book. Joan Winchell, a longstanding member of the society, donated funds to make possible the book’s production. Devon Cox managed the project.

Constance’s autograph book is an unparalleled window into manners, behaviour, expectations and the nature of celebrity in late nineteenth century London. Constance was very considered in her invitations to contribute to her autograph book, so it has entries from a diverse group of men and women, from Prime Ministers and actors to musicians and spiritualists. And it has some interesting omissions, such as Oscar’s soon to be growing group of male friends.

The entries range from the profound to the peculiar. G. F. Watts painter and sculptor put “our greatest happiness should be found in the happiness of others” and “you did not promise to be her mother-in-law” is playwright Elizabeth Merivale’s rather odd contribution. And although her husband’s renown was obviously helpful in gaining signatures, the autograph book clearly reflects Constance’s independent values, spirit and aspirations. Oscar’s entry, the second in the book following that of Oliver Wendell Holmes, is unsurprisingly the most intimate of all. It reads: “from a poet to a poem” and although Oscar has used this line elsewhere in his work, it is no less touching an expression of his respect and admiration for his wife. At least at the time, when she was still the love of his life.

So why should we care about the autograph book of a woman long dead and buried, who died tragically young and whose life was so overshadowed by her glamorous husband? Isn’t this little autograph book just an elaborate form of name-dropping, of literary showing off? Yes, it is an exercise in name dropping, but these names are not just collected, Constance Wilde has deliberately curated them and this is part of the fascination of the book. The names so assiduously gathered, reflect some sliver of Constance’s spirit and values. Artists and poets feature heavily, as do actors including Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt.

In the beginning of their marriage Oscar’s fame and notoriety dominated Constance’s life, and then shame and notoriety were ascendant. They forced Constance to leave the country and change her and her children’s names. First glamour and then misery. But somewhere in that glorious and successful phase of Oscar’ life, first as a heterosexual man, then as a bisexual one and then homosexual, Constance was in love and happy. Oscar too was in love and happy. The autograph book was mostly created during this period of their lives, when Constance was emerging as a socially and politically independent woman. A woman sufficiently confident and bold to hold her own in Oscar’s orbit, albeit fleetingly.

Constance was his soul mate and lover, intellectually for a little while and briefly physically. But Oscar was a serial explorer both intellectually and sexually, so it never was going to last long. Apart from their two boys, there are very few expressions of Constance in Wilde’s life. Her autograph book gives us a small shred of insight into the woman and her life with one of the world’s greatest authors. With contributions from artists such as James Whistler and William Morris, from politicians such as Gladstone, through to authors including Mark Twain and George Meredith, the book reflects Constance Wilde’s life and times but also her eclecticism. It’s a wonderful thing indeed. 

Devon Cox has overseen the production of the project and even if you don’t fancy reading all the musings in the book, his introduction alone is worth the purchase. You can buy it here: https://oscarwildesociety.co.uk/autograph-book/

PS Is it just me or is there a striking similarity in looks between Constance and Bosie?

Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis (not a review in the end) – if you want to know more about Oscar Wilde go here:

Laurel Lindström 3 Comments

https://oscarwildesociety.co.uk

Dear Oscar,

My hero.

I am writing to tell you about the latest big fat biography of yourself, you, Oscar Wilde. You’ve probably already read Oscar: a Life by Matthew Sturgis, but if not do. It’s a vast catalogue of your life, a huge collection of facts all gathered together in a single volume and narrated with lively enthusiasm by historian Matthew Sturgis. Even for people not inclined to read or to learn more about your sainted self, it’s an easy page turner. Like you, the book is an astonishing achievement, exhaustive, charming and compelling, and only minorly flawed by the publisher’s sloppy production.

The book tracks the timeline of your life with immense detail. Your upbringing in Ireland and time at Portora School are carefully documented, along with masses of skinny on your relatives, family, friends and contemporaries. Your brilliance and sometime (fleeting) sportiness are shared, as are the details of your move to Trinity College Dublin and thence to Oxford. It was at Oxford that your identity as an artist started taking tangible shape, along with your previously under-developed abilities to command attention, involvement and direction. You’re soon drawn to London and its fashionable society, a larger and more demanding stage where you continued to thrive rising slowly through the soup. But you had no readily accessible means of earning a decent living, despite winning the Newdigate Prize for Ravenna in 1878 and publishing Poems in 1881. Transition was needed from poet, to performer, author and playwright, and was soon in motion.

The brilliant idea of an American tour was almost a disaster following your first performance in New York City in 1882. D’Oyly Carte had wisely hedged his gamble with only a single booking for the preening society aesthete with unproven oratory skills. Subsequent tentative dates were only to be confirmed following responses to the initial outing. Despite a rough start, the lecture and the jokes worked out and you grew over the coming months into a polished and popular performer.

It was clear from the outset that Oscar Wilde’s outwardly shifting persona would respond to the demands of audience as it did throughout the 1882 US tour. But persona and audience morphed in tandem throughout your life. Aspiration and vanity, victories and collapses, your evolving sexuality from heterosexual, bisexual to homosexual, shaped your identity and presentation. A pattern in others’ of cautious or bold risk-taking, mirrored your own mercurialism. It traces across your life: diminished risk to publish or stage your work as your reputation grew; increased risk to commercial ventures of your notoriety and attendant outrageousness. No rules. 

Mr Sturgis presents a clear picture of your obvious brilliance and magic, and also of your vulnerability to flattery and beauty. No surprises there. And throughout his work Mr Sturgis energetically corrects errors in literary critic Richard Ellman’s definitive biography, published after Ellman’s death in 1987. But the huge numbers of typographic errors publisher Head of Zeus has allowed in Oscar: a Life rather undermines one’s confidence in these corrections. I am sure someone has already pointed them out, but throughout the text’s 720 pages there is barely a chapter without mistakes: your funeral was on the 3rd December, not the 3rd November. Is it Salomé or Salome? And shouldn’t pronouns and verbs agree? 

We learn that intellect untamed searches always for innovative ideas, insights and perspectives no matter how grungy their habitats or philosophy (remember the Decadents?). Pushing the ideas of others to their limits, challenging social convention and expectations whether in poems or fashion or home décor began with you, you, Oscar Wilde. And it’s what all of us now aspire to. Aesthetic traditions, their particularities, expression, are conversely universal and unique, for individuals are simultaneously ordinary and exceptional. Whatever the green eyed James Whistler charges, your aesthetic persona and expression are more than a reworking of someone else’s philosophy. Thankfully this comes through in Oscar a Life.

It’s also clear that your genius morphs with your humanity, kindness and individualism subverted, or glittered, with vanity and ego. The emergence of the Oscar Wilde persona began early, grew as your genius became apparent, was amplified by fame and then started to distort. But never, ever did your brilliance, underlying decency and generosity of spirit diminish. Throughout the public scenes, trials and imprisonment, consideration for others was always there. It too often got lost in the torrent of passion for Bosie and his evil influence and subculture corruption. Denial and shame made you spiteful sometimes, as guilt and embarrassment periodically trumped kindness. This was particularly and horribly evident in your dealings Constance and others whom you should have trusted more. But you know this.

Knowledge, carnal or otherwise, was always your fuel but sadly wisdom too often lingered a little too long, as it does for most of us. Our shared frailty is why people still read and enjoy your work, why love for Oscar Wilde is spread so far and wide. You are not forgotten and your influence persists, variously cloaked in notoriety and hero worship. It’s acknowledged by those who know you. It’s obviously unacknowledged by those who are unknowingly beholden to you, but they are many.

You show us the origins of much that distresses modern life: performance and identity, the need for audience and attention, the desire to be heard and taken seriously, understanding what it is to be as one and as one of many. The paradoxes in which you so delight are clear in both biographies. Truth and lies, male and female, brutality and gentleness, hypocrisy and faith, the secptic and the trusting, mirrors all. But the paradoxes are clearest in your works. They veil our ugliest traits, our vanities and deceits, ignorance and denials. In the darkly radical The Picture of Dorian Grey and the evanescent humour of The Importance of Being Earnest our own hypocrisies are played out.

You were not self-destructive (too vain for that), but rather caught in a vortex of events, shocked and horrified at your own reversal, that your gainsayers really did mean it. That this time there was no chance of rebounding. You knew disaster was coming but instead stood fast, brave, and faced it. It was a matter of honour and truth, of the artistry of life in black and white and of your own integrity in the dock. You stood on a stage of your own construction and were not cowed when enemies tried to dismantle it. Not then, not now.

Ever yours,

– A Woman of Even Less Importance.

PS “…No longer now shall Slander’s venomed spite 
Crawl like a snake across his perfect name, 
Or mar the lordly scutcheon of his fame. …”

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins – A Review

Laurel Lindström 1 Comment

Part II

This is the second part of my review of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. The first part focuses on the book, it’s story and my opinion of it. This part addresses the antagonism directed at Jeanine Cummins for having the temerity to write about brown people, even though she is white.

Authors under attack

Author Jeanine Cummins was attacked by a cohort of women of central and northern American backgrounds, on the basis that Jeanine Cummins should not have written American Dirt because she is not Mexican. And? 

In the case of Jeanine Cummins the controversy kicked off when American Dirt was selected by Oprah Winfrey, a big name USA celeb, as her latest Oprah’s Book Club pick. Accusers say that as a white American woman Ms Cummins should not have written a novel about a brown Mexican woman. She had no right to the story, even though it’s a work of fiction based on creative thinking, research, hard work and peer reviews. The charge is not unlike that levelled at Edna O’Brien for Girl a novel that follows a group of young girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria and one girl in particular. Both authors have been attacked for their work, despite the fact that their books illuminated otherwise very dark and unseen places. Besides vilification, the two writers also share another rather more important quality: imagination and dedication. But for that they get no credit. 

Half empty, half full, twice the size it needs to be, or a glass in need of topping up?

Why can these half-empty types not just appreciate American Dirt for the wonderful writing, the strong characterisations and the insight into what thousands of people face every day just to survive, baffles. When are we going to get over this proprietariness when it comes to ideas, characters and stories? It seems that it’s more important to discourage and block, to put people off their work, to prevent them expressing the stories and ideas in their heads, to stop them sharing what they see, how they see it and why they think it matters. Does imagination and commitment to the work of getting it onto the page need permission? And if so, why? Is it because people don’t want to be offended? If so there are plenty of intensely offensive books out there. Don’t buy them if you think you may be offended. But also don’t whinge because someone else told the story first.

Same pic as in part one of this review because Jeanine Cummins’ agent has ignored my request for a photo. And why not, I’m a nobody and clearly not deserving of courtesy.

Headline news

That American Dirt had massive support from a powerful publishing machine (Headline, a Hachette imprint) makes matters worse for the antis. It makes it better for readers and the author, because it means more people are exposed to the book and the ugly realities it describes. The antis overlook that the deal to publish followed a three day bidding war involving nine publishers. They believe, probably correctly, that another author might not have received the seven figure advance, the promotions and publicity that Cummins got. But the original book proposal was instantly resonant for so many publishers because of its timeliness and relevance, plus its commercial potential. Cummins was signed to a major publisher and got the ginormous advance not because she is white but because her work sells. Cummins has already published three other books which sold well so she’s got solid track record of delivering the goods. A known quantity. In commercial terms the subject matter and the author of American Dirt are low risk. Publication of American Dirt isn’t about exploiting underrepresented authors, being insensitive to cultural fragilities or not supporting emerging talent. It’s about commercial risk and sales. That’s the reality.

In 1890 Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray “To define is to limit.” Perhaps we should all stop trying to limit the imaginations of creative people, and should instead put aside envy and jealousy. We should stop letting life’s unfairness get in the way of appreciating what others create, whoever they are. Let’s stop the creeping censorship, let’s stop seeking out people to criticise and condemn, and let’s think about the real implications of the whole concept of individual cancellation. It’s been tried many times in the course of history and it always ends badly.

Book club pick

I came to this book because it was required reading for our book club. I knew nothing about it or the fuss, but was hooked from the first page. The insights and perspective and horror for Lydia, Luca and the two sisters is impossible to step away from. They cling and invade with increasing tenacity as the reader moves along through the story alongside these people who exert such a pull. They’re with me still. American Dirt helps us to gradually understand that all of us are vulnerable to this awfulness, but for a few twists of fate and luck. The migrant’s desperate trek is not an abstract, distant, elsewhere problem. It is here and now, it is part of our humanity and inhumanity. In her details and the reality she creates, with imagination, research and dogged hard work, Jeanine Cummins sustains excitement and tension throughout the 454 pages of American Dirt. When you put it down you may be surprised to find yourself shaking and your blood pressure up. Prose like breathing, intense and rapid from start to finish.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins – a Review

Laurel Lindström 2 Comments

This review is in two parts. The first part focuses on the book, it’s story and my opinion of it. The second part addresses the antagonism directed at Jeanine Cummins for having the temerity to write about brown people, even though she is white.

Part I

American Dirt is the story of Lydia and Luca, a mother and her eight year old son. They are on the run following the brutal assassination of all their relations, sixteen people, at a family birthday party. Lydia’s husband had been an investigative journalist. The brutal murders follow the publication of Sebastián’s in depth profile of a local Mexican cartel boss and his growing influence. The massacre is supposed to kill the entire family, everyone at the party. But Lydia and Luca, hiding in the loo, are overlooked and escape.

The book follows Lydia and Luca’s terrifying progress as they flee their home city, Acapulco, to make their way north to the United States. The journey is over 2700 km. The cartel equivalent of an All Points Bulletin, complete with Lydia’s image, is shared across Mexico throughout the criminal network and beyond to spies, informers and hangers on, anyone who’ll turn Lydia and Luca in for gain. It’s a terrifying premise made all the more sinister by the fact that Lydia, unaware of his identity, had become friends with the head of the cartel.

Javier, boss of the vile Los Jardineros cartel, had been a frequent visitor to the bookshop Lydia owns and the two share a love of books and poetry. Their kindred platonic bond had grown increasingly intimate and personal over several months. Javier calls Lydia the Queen of his soul, rather than the Queen of his heart (his wife) or of his pants (his mistress). Lydia treats their closeness as an asexual and private personal intimacy based on a shared love of literature.

These two complex and conflicted characters evoke all that is precious about relationships that don’t count as extramarital affairs, yet are profound and meaningful in an extramarital dimension. As Lydia flees she constantly re-examines to horrible effect her latent deceit or not deceit, naivety or trust, truth or lies and how she was so duped or not duped. What did she not see? What did she see? Who was that man? Who was she?

Ignore the fuss and read this book. It will stay with you.

Following the murders Lydia is a perpetual twist of emotional confusion  which gradually resolves into the only emotion she can feel: hate for Javier. She examines her relationship with her murdered husband, their deep love, romance and friendship, all that they shared. Mixed in with the hate and fear, she must hold fast to and protect Luca, all the while travelling under a veil of horror. Lydia must allow Luca his pain and his grief, and yet keep uppermost the urgency and danger of their journey. “If there’s one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief”. No time for sorrow. This must be balanced with trust and Luca’s faith in her. For the most part Cummins achieves this balance and only occasionally does the reader feel that Luca is just a little too good to be true, that his flawless acquiescence to his situation and his mother’s ministerings is real. The tears are too few.

Javier is another matter. Lydia knows him viscerally as do we as the story unfolds. She knows that Javier will never let her go, that he wants to own her in death if not in life. Lydia and the reader are unaware that Lydia and Javier share in loss, until towards the end of the book. Running from Javier and his interlinked network of ghouls to a place of safety is all that matters for Lydia and Luca. That network ranges from hotel receptionists to bus drivers, so evil and ever-present death dog their every moment. They are unable to pause to mourn or grieve or even to fully comprehend the horror of what has and is happening.

Cummins handles this tension deftly whilst keeping the book’s momentum going. Along the way they meet up with two young sisters following different but equally dreadful terrrors. The two girls and Lydia and Luca are cautious, suspicious and reluctant to share their stories. There’s the fear always that the more you share, the more you have at risk, and might lose. As the small group pushes on in the blind hope of new life in El Norte, other migrants some new to the migrant path and some not join them. And yet never is there much sense of comradery. All of them know this is fragile, transitory. They know the chances of reaching safety are slim, that everyone is an enemy, a threat, a risk. So they keep mostly quiet and trudge on, an intense blend of fear and hope pushing them all forwards. And we are there too, with every agonising and possibly futile step.

Read this book!

This is a story everyone should read. American Dirt is a story that takes a wrecking ball to our cosy sense of first-world safety and security. It leaves us bereft and distressed, haunted and overwhelmed. Shock and fear creep over us with every page; a sense of ghastly, guilty relief echoes though our senses as we keep on turning the pages, urgent and desperate to know what happens next. We are guilty because we know it’s not us, but there are lots of others suffering what these migrants suffer. The awfulness of Lydia and Luca’s experience can be kept at arm’s length, but it cannot be kept entirely away from our sense of safety. We read wide-eyed and gorge on this awful story. Yet we are secure and largely protected from the organised lawlessness that is everyday reality in Mexico, Honduras, Guatamala and elsewhere around the world.

This is a story everyone should read, because it hasn’t been told quite like this before. This is a story everyone should read, despite the hostility it provoked when first published. It is so vital a story that it doesn’t matter who wrote it. This is a story everyone should read, because its author binds the reader tight to the characters with every dangerous step of the way. In our guts comes some glimmer of understanding of what these people, the unwilling migrants, go through and the horrors of their experience.