William Cooper's Scenes from Married Life

William Cooper's comedies are little read anymore, or so I presume, as they are out-of-print.  In the '80s, an Avon paperback of two of his novels in one volume was very popular, and that was my introduction to his gently irreverent novels.  Cooper (1910-2002), a physics-teacher-turned-civil-servant, was best-known for five autobiographical novels, Scenes from Provincial Life, Scenes from Metropolitan Life, Scenes from Married Life, Scenes from Later Life, and Scenes from Death and Life.  Although these novels are light, the heroes were rebellious enough that journalists declared Cooper, along with Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, and John Osborne, one of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s.  The narrator of Cooper's Scenes books, Joe Lunn, is a likable, preternaturally observant man with a droll sense of humor and puzzling talent for alienating his boss.  In some ways, he reminds me of Lucky Jim.

On the surface these are light novels, and it is difficult to understand why Cooper was controversial.  The first book in the series, Scenes from Provincial Life, was a hit in 1950, but his second, Scenes from a Metropolitan Life, written in the mid-'50s, could not be published till 1982 because of a threatened libel suit by the woman who was the model for the character Myrtle.  So they were originally published out of sequence, with the third, Scenes from Married Life, coming out in 1960. 

I recently read Scenes from Married Life with great enjoyment.  Why was Cooper an angry young man?  There is much talk about sex, work, alienating authority, and the desirability of women's working or not working. I can only think these elements were emblematic of the Angry Young Man label. The narrator, Joe, is a handsome writer, almost 40, who has never married and who works for the civil service interviewing scientists and engineers.  His immediate boss, Robert, is a friend and also a writer; they correct proofs of each other's novels. 

But there is something about Joe that riles up people in authority.  Robert's boss, Murray-Hamilton, has classified Joe as MISC/INEL (miscellaneous ineligible) on an official form, supposedly by accident.   Robert convinces Joe to remain quiet around Murray-Hamilton (and other bosses), because his manner is misunderstood.

This novel focuses on Joe's getting married.   It begins with his accompanying Sybil, his librarian girlfriend, on the bus to her train. Sybil says, "P.S.A." and  Joe is puzzled, looking for letters on a sign. Finally she tells him it means "Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, of course."


"I burst into laughter.  It was appreciative laughter.  Just before getting on to the bus, Sybil and I had been in bed together."

Joe and Sybil have a casual relationship that centers on going to bed. Beautiful, brainy Sybil looks like Marlene Dietrich, but after sex she recites soliloquies from Shakespeare.  

But somehow she is not the one for Joe. And when he meets Elspeth, a much younger woman, at a party, he immediately falls in love.  There is a charming scene in which he drops her on the dance floor and they are attracted as he catches her. And yet he doesn't see her for months afterwards.  Robert's marriage to a young artist, Annette, propels Joe toward Elspeth and the altar. 

The young women are fascinating.  Robert and Joe object to wives in the workplace, but Elspeth and Annette insist on doing what they want.  There is a scene where Joe, Elspeth, and Annette have tea in a cafe near the school where Elspeth teaches in a working-class area of London.  Annette plans to take Elspeth's job at the end of term, when Elspeth steps down, and Elspeth fervently supports Annette's right to work, much to the astonishment of the men.  Annette says she plans to have four children and teach.


Then Joe writes a novel about his happy marriage.  The publisher refuses it  because of discreetly  happy sex scenes;  the  Home Office is battening down on anything that hints at sex.

Obviously this mirrors Cooper's own experiences with publishing.

It's a very funny, very sweet book.  It is not a great book.  The writing is simple, spare, charming, and unmemorable.  But I did enjoy it and hope to get back to the first two one day.

Bibliobits: Michael Dirda, Bad PR, and Susan Hill

Michael Dirda.  Inspired by Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing, I'm reading other books about books.  Michael Dirda, a Washington Post book critic, has a gift for extolling books--poetry, literature, science fiction, reference books, translations--that might not otherwise get reviewed.  Reviewers often desperately over-puff books, and I think this is because book sections have been cut so severely that space is no longer wasted on the bad. As a Pulitzer-winning columnist and editor for the Washington Post Book World, Dirda can do what he wants and often revisits classics.  I reread Oblomov a few years ago because he praised a new translation.  

I have begun Dirda's Bound to Please:  An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education, a collection of "20 percent of the reviews and essays" he's written for the Washington Post Book World.  These columns emphasize lesser-known writers like Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Quenoa,and Flann O'Brien, but he also includes famous writers like Herodotus and Thomas Pynchon.  

He admits he doesn't have a lot of time to write:  he is a literary journalist.  He reads slowly, researches in libraries, often adds a personal slant to his column, and has two days away from his editorial duties to write his weekly essay. 

In the essay "Reading Beyond the Best-Seller List:  A Polemic and a Plea," he muses about the 2005 National Endowment for the Arts report on "readers at risk."  Only one in six Americans reads 12 or more books in a year.  

Dirda thinks this is appalling, and that junk accounts for many of those books. He thinks quality has gone down.   He writes:  

"More and more, we have been straitjacketed and brainwashed by the books of the moment, the passing moment.  Publishers know that they can promote almost any title to best-sellerdom.  Glittery names and hot topics guarantee big sales..."

This is too often true.  Dirda believes The Da Vinci Code accounted for many of the 12 or more books read by one in six Americans in 2005.  

Best-sellers actually discourage me, though.  I didn't read Franzen's Freedom, ignored Keith Richards' memoir, and only recently picked up Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, a science fiction/speculative fiction/satire.

I was put off by the publicity.  That didn't hurt sales.

  
Dirda can help us sort out the good from the bad.

Bad PR. Many bloggers declare they write only about books they enjoy. The bad books ooze and trickle through their hands like melting bubble gum on a hot day. Sometimes things get a little PRish online.  Am I a PR firm?  No, I am otherwise employed.  We are not very ladylike here, and ponder the bad with the good, and hope to do it fairly enough that you can figure out which books you'll enjoy, whether I laud or deplore them.

Susan Hill.  Sorry, I can't read Susan Hill. Honestly, I've heard so much good about her that I feel guilty about casting off her books.  I very much enjoyed Howards End Is on the Landing, but have put aside two of her novels, The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story and The Shadows in the Street:  A Simon Serrailer Mystery. These are not my kind of books.

Bloggers push her atmospheric ghost stories, but often add to adulatory reviews that they are predictable. 

Are her earlier books better?  The Woman in Black is commercially successful.  Made into a TV movie.   But her spare style in two recent books (2005 and 2010) is dull and cliche-driven.

Quote from The Man in the Picture (p. 66):

"There was a brief instant when what I saw made me experience a wave of shock so tremendous that I felt rising nausea and the room seemed to lurch crazily from side to side.  What had been at the back of my mind came to the very front of it and clicked into place.  Yet how could I believe what I was seeing?  How could this be?"

Reminds me a little of Emma Tennant, another award-winning writer I can't read. On the basis of Adele:  Jane Eyre's Hidden Story, the story of Jane Eyre's pupil, Adele, at Thornfield Hall, I dismissed Tennant as a writer of sequels to women's books. But apparently she also has written post-modern novels.

Hill is a Booker judge this year.  Let's hope she picks a good book. 

Snowbound and Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing

The snowstorm moved up from the South.

It would blanket much of the rest of the country before it was done. Newscasters were frenzied.  Stay home unless you have to go out. 

I arrived the night before the storm in the town where my relative is in the hospital. I came because I was the only one unfazed by snow.  Walkers can walk, you know.  If you're a non-driver, you're used to bundling up and walking in bad weather.    

The afternoon of the storm I prepared by buying a knapsack.  I needed to keep my hands free so I could balance in the snow.  I walked home that night through heavy snow and slanting ice.  

The next day 15 inches of snow covered the ground and I couldn't open the door of the house. The snow came up to the picture window. It was Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie.  I found a broom and pushed the door open.  Then I had to find a shovel. It was perched in the snow in the front yard.

The buses were canceled, the university was canceled, the library was closed and the co-op where I had hoped to purchase vegetables closed, but I went out.

Once I got off the side streets, it was easier.  There was little traffic.  I turned onto a main street and walked in the street, leaning into walls of snow on the curb when SUVs or slipping drivers came by.  I was relieved to find walks shoveled on a main drag, but inexplicably the snowplows had stopped digging out at the fire station. 

So then I had to detour and scramble over snowbanks downtown until I found a shoveled sidewalk.  Then I came to a main-ish thoroughfare where a big wall of snow stood in the middle of the street.  I fell down in the snow.

I brushed myself off and went to the hospital. Nobody took the relative's vital signs and I only saw a nurse when the relative called to be taken to the bathroom.  Perhaps they were understaffed--or was that just the kitchen?  The dietitian told me she had made the oatmeal herself that morning.  My relative is lower-maintenance two weeks after surgery (I'm making excuses for the nurses).  There are some good nurses, but, honestly, most days they spend seven minutes with her per shift at best.  Vital signs, taking her to the bathroom (when she called them).  That's why it's necessary for one of us to be with her.  Thank God doctors are observant when they do come in. 


Remember Big Nurse?  She lives.  I met her yesterday.  It was quite a disconcerting experience to be told that my relative, who has improved immensely, was no longer mentally competent.  I think the relative has a brain since she was able to beat me at cards and even cheat (yes, she changes the rules sometimes:  it's immoral, but what can you do?).   I let her win one game, but the other she won. 

At the hospital I began to read Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing.  I wasn't aware that it was available in the U.S., but picked up a copy when I bought my knapsack. This collection of short essays is addictive.  This is now a favorite book about books. Actually Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money are the best essays on books I've ever read, but Hill ranks with, say, Anne Fadiman.

Howards End Is on the Landing was inspired by Hill's looking for one book on her shelves and discovering many unread books and others she wanted to reread.  She decided to spend a year reading only books from her home library and not buying any new books.

"I wanted to repossess my books, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map this house of many volumes.  There are enough here to divert, instruct, entertain, amaze, amuse, edify, improve, enrich me for far longer than a year and every one of them deserves to be taken down and dusted off, opened and read.  A book which is left on a shelf is dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object, packed with potential to burst into a new life.  Wandering through the house that day looking for one elusive book, my eyes were reopened to how much of that life we stored here, neglected or ignored."

These short essays explore the creativity of Virginia Woolf, Dickens, George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen, diaries, travel writing, short stories, children's' books, forgotten writers, her dislike of Jane Austen, and more.

Hill has impeccable taste. Her passion for Virginia Woolf, and her pleasure in Quentin Bell's biography and A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, reminded me of my own enthusiasm for Woolf at 20. I should reread her. It's odd that I've neglected her.  I've been afraid it was only a youth thing.  Some of the books I loved have not held up.

Hill declares Iris Murdoch is a neglected writer.  She is probably right.  I enjoyed The Sea, the Sea and many of her other books in the '80s, but it is a case of having read almost all her novels and then forgotten about her.  Are her books classics?

Elizabeth Bowen.  I love her work and keep reading her.

And then there were many I'd never heard of. The book has an English slant.  Usually books about books seem universal, but Hill writes about several books that never made it in the U.S..  Arthur Geary.  David Storey.  The only one I've heard of in this chapter on forgotten writers is Alan Silitoe.  I loved The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

My only complaints about this wonderful book are:  1. there is no Table of Contents nor index;  2.  I relish Hills's criticism, but the anecdotes about the writers she has met are fulsome and detract from the book. There is too much name-dropping.  Many love celebrity gossip, but Hill's stories of great writers do not belong in this very short book.  More on books, please.  But I enjoyed reading about her friends Pamela Hansford Johnson and C. P. Snow, because they are among my favorite writers, and I don't think they're read much now. 

And perhaps Hill inspired all that blogger talk of not buying books?  I learned about this book from English bloggers, many of whom have in the past year resisted buying new books.  Is buying books an internet craze?  I know I buy more than I used to do.  Do we buy too much because we hear so much about books now?  I've added one or two books to my TBR list today.

Expect a Susan Hill novel-reading binge next.

Girlebooks: Roast Beef, Medium

Girlebooks has just published Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's delightful, humorous collection of short stories, Roast Beef, Medium (first published in 1913).  Ferber's witty heroine, Emma McChesney, is a successful petticoat saleswoman and a divorced mother with a remarkable sense of humor.

Laura, the publisher of Girlebooks, learned about Roast Beef, Medium from Frisbee.   Thanks, Laura, for publishing this beautifully designed free ebook, and, by the way, for the other beautiful editions at your charming website.

Last Rites and The Importance of Cheerfulness

The relative I visited last week is recovering slowly, as I expected.  The doctor said the blood work and the prognosis were good.

So I was amazed when the priest came in rattling his vials of oil for Last Rites.  I rapidly father-son-holy-ghosted, pausing to ascertain whether the Sign of the Cross  was left-to-right or right-to-left.  Fortunately I remembered correctly, as I didn't want to participate in a witches' sabbath.  Then I zipped the lips as in a silent movie. I didn't believe it was time for Last Rites.  I listened to the mouthings of "Lord have mercy!" by the non-Catholic relative who called the priest.

The rest of us did not say the responses.  We were too stunned by the extravagant gesture of the sacrament. Apparently Last Rites can be called for someone very ill, but it is more usual for the terminally ill or dying.

Certainly I didn't like all that talk of death for my confused
relative.

"Cheery-bye!"  I said to the priest.

The problem with the meddling, non-Catholic Last Rites organizer, whom I will refer to as Mr. Death, is that he is a depressive.  He insensitively exaggerates the severity of her illness to her (which is severe enough at her age) and does not expect her to walk or eat, the major goals right now. He scorns the goals.

So we are in the waiting room while our relative has surgery and he is talking about a divorce that happened in the '70s.

"Can you forgive his infidelities?  He didn't pay a penny of child support."

Ancient history, and besides, they made a deal that each would financially support the child he or she had custody of.  The family was split.  Sad, isn't it?  But it was many years ago AND people moved on.      

I tried to explain that these are human problems, common.

"I'm sure she has forgiven him."

"She hasn't."

I'm thinking, She's a Catholic.  What about those Last Rites?

Mr. Death is suspicious of the rest of us. He seems to think we are there to get her to change her will.  Love doesn't come into it for him. He talks only about her money.  He is obsessed with selling the house and talks about it in front of her. Charming. The rest of us hope she will be able to return home and have attempted to explain to him that a washer and dryer could be installed on the first floor so everything could be on one level.  

Mr. Death. (whining):  "When I think of what she used to be able to do.  And they're cutting her nutrition bag by a third." 

Me:  "That's a good thing.  It's been less than a week since the surgery and she's eating on her own."

Different points-of-view, eh?

I'm sure I'll be back next week, but I have a different schedule now.  I'm there only when Mr. Death is not.

The importance of cheerfulness cannot be overestimated  in that gloomy hospital.

Women's History: Stephanie Coontz and Gail Gollins

Two fascinating new women's history books, Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring:  The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, and Gail Collins's When Everything Changed:  The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, analyze changes in women's role in society over the last 50 years.  

The former is a critical study of Betty Friedan's 1963 bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique, and its effect on the women who read it in the 1960s; the latter is a lively general history which also briefly chronicles Friedan's role in the Women's Movement.  The two writers' approaches to history are very different.  Coontz, a professor of history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, summarizes and analyzes Friedan's book in the context of twentieth-century history.  Although A Strange Stirring is well-organized, well-written, and very readable, Coontz is weirdly irritated by small perceived inaccuracies in Friedan's interpretation of data. She comes to terms with the book in the course of criticizing it.  It is a page-turner, if you can believe that of a scholarly non-fiction book.

Collins, a columnist at The New York Times who was the newspapers' first female editorial page editor, is more blatantly feminist yet has a pop-light journalistic tone that not may not be everyone's cup of tea. When Everything Changed is much more ambitious than A Strange Stirring, and though it is a bit disorganized, I am enjoying it immensely. 

I find both books addictive.  There is terrific information in both.

Our mothers read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, or perhaps when it was released in paperback. It inspired women to question their lives as housewives, and Friedan received much mail saying it had changed women's lives.  I read it in junior high.  Although my friends and I didn't aspire to traditional break-out careers like law or medicine, and pursued liberal arts, neither did we relive our mothers' lives. The Feminine Mystique was inspiring.

Friedan, a freelance writer and alumna of Smith College, spent a year preparing a questionnaire for the fifteenth reunion of her class of 1942.  She published an article on their despair and wasted education  and then expanded it it into a book.  Many of her housewife classmates admitted they "were slowly going crazy in their well-appointed homes, just as she felt she had been doing" (Collins, p. 58).  Friedan said women were coerced to "waste their lives on meaningless household chores in order to create profits for the manufacturers of household goods." (Collins)  She encouraged them to work part-time or go to school while their children were growing up.  It is not the radical book that many condemned, though she did compare being a housewife to living in a concentration camp.

On the other hand, Coontz admits that she thought she was above Friedan's book in the '60s and that she could do any work she wanted. (A very unusual attitude for a woman born in 1944, I would say.)    Coontz taught The Feminine Mystique a few years ago and said she and her students found it very dated.  It was not her idea to write A Strange Stirring:  she was asked to take on the project. Although she isn't the enthusiast I expected, I very much enjoy her detailed history of the American women's suffrage movement, followed by the greater freedom of women, and then the post-war cocooning of women till the Women's Movement blossomed in the '60s.  In the course of the book she questions Friedan's reasoning and claims she exaggerated the post-war changes in attitudes toward women and the family, but she seems to reaffirm Friedan's conclusions.    

I should read more women's history.

Bibliobits

Iowa Book & Supply:  If You Can Get Past the Campus Paraphernalia, It's a Good Bookstore

I'm thrilled to be home, reading my blogs again and catching up on articles about Borders' financial recovery.  When I wasn't doing my stints at the hospital, I bought FIVE BOOKS at various bookstores, my favorite being Iowa Book & Crook, but I'm happy to support Borders again. 

"They know you're back in town," my husband said. 

Most of the time I was reading on my Nook--I hardly dared to buy a Kobo because I feared Borders would go out of business any minute--but there's nothing better than a real physical book. After finishing Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing, I discovered I myself was the mistress of an e-book I'd never read again.  I can't sell it and I can't give it away, and I usually give 100 REALLY GOOD BOOKS to the Charity Book Sale. So nobody gets to read my copy of this Governor General's award winner, as it metaphorically rattles around in my e-reader until I delete it.  That's why it's much, much better to download free out-of-print books from manybooks.net onto your e-reader.

Anyway, I am reminded  of this hilarious video episode from "The Book vs. the Kindle" at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.  I do love my Nook, by the way, but you're going to understand the point of this immediately.

So an e-reader is really best for reading books in the public domain.  I have, however, bought some e-books I love, among them Alison Weir's Lady in the Tower.

What's been happening in the blog & review world this week?

Dovegreyreader is reading more men writers this year.  She has started a William Golding project, and, coincidentally, my husband collected some William Golding paperbacks to read in 2011, "but I can always change my mind," he said when I told him Dovegreyreader was his soulmate.  (He thinks I should stop blogging and return to writing essays and is tired of hearing about dovegrey.) 

Elaine Showalter at The Washington Post has written a fascinating review of Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring, a study of women who read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in the '60s.  

The National Book Critics Circle has announced its award finalists. 

The Hospital and the Lady's Maid

Winter Scene

A relative is ill.  I've been shuttling back and forth between the hospital and temporary lodgings.  I think you'll agree that patients need an advocate in the hospital, someone to make sure they don't lie in bed neglected or in pain, too dazed to remember how to push the button to call the nurse. Care varies.  I'm there for stints when no one else can be there.  It's complicated by the fact that Relative A doesn't speak to Relative B because of something that happened at a family reunion in 1989, or was it 1979?  Relatives C, D, and E try to reconcile A and B. Nothing works, so I'm staying out of the way.  

It's very difficult to read in the hospital. I've been dashing out in the afternoon to eat vegetable sushi at a nearby restaurant, and almost fell asleep over my book at the table yesterday. Then I tried to get coffee at a kiosk and a boy informed me that he was out of everything except decaf.  "Are you going to make another pot of coffee?"  "No, we don't have any more coffee."  "Really?"  

Fortunately I found some in the hospital cafeteria.  

I have read Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing this week.  It won the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 2009 in Canada and was recently published here.  It's the story of Sally Naldrett, the lady's maid of Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, a writer of the 19th century best known for Letters from Egypt.  She moved from England to Egypt because of her tuberculosis, and Sally, her devoted maid of many years, accompanied her.  In Egypt, Sally became involved with the Lady's dragoman, Omar Abu Halaweh, and got pregnant.  After helping to deliver Sally's baby, Lady Duff Gordon banished her from her service.  And Pullinger imagines the situation from Sally's point of view.  

It's a very short novel, and the first part is very interesting.  Sally has a reserved but intelligent voice, is devoted to her bold mistress, and the description of their travels through Egypt is lyrical and fine, perhaps adapted from Letters to Egypt.  Lady Duff Gordon is a fascinating character.  She  taught Sally to read.  She translated literature from the French and German.  She knew George Meredith.  When she moved to Egypt, she lived for writing letters.  

"It was as though writing these letters was as important as the day itself had been, if not more so, as though these letters home had become her work, replacing all the other writing she had done in her life."

And it is fascinating when both reject their European women's clothing. 

I must admit, I became a little bored with Sally after she gave birth to Omar's son.  You would think she would become a more fully realized character then, but instead she just hides out in the house while Omar takes care of Lady Duff-Gordon.  Finally she is sent away, with orders to leave her baby with Omar's family.  Lady Duff Gordon ruins her life.

Sally works at a hotel in Cairo and arranges her life so she can visit her son.  Omar, however, is a big disappointment.  He refuses to allow Sally to live with his parents and first wife, because he is afraid of being fired.  Lady Duff Gordon has told him he cannot have anything to do with Sally if he wishes to work for her.  Lady Duff Gordon seems half in love with him herself.

It's a puzzling novel--so muted and plain--and one has the impression that not much happens, though much IS happening.  There's a lack of drama about the narrative.   it reminds me of Margaret Forster's novel, Lady's Maid, the story of Elizabeth Wilson, the maid of another sick writer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I have to say that I prefer Forster's novel, but I enjoyed Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing.  

Reading Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story in a Small Town

Abandoned railroad in small town.

A friend was kind enough to let me stay in his empty house in a small town. We'll skip the family emergency that brought me here, because everyone has them and you don't need me to describe it.  Let's concentrate instead on the place.  Founded in 1879, it was once a thriving railroad town and had a flour mill and a ferry.   Sometime in the 20th century the railroad and small industries died, the population dwindled, and it is now a bedroom community.  It still has a grocery store, a small downtown, a public library, a good restaurant, and a roller rink.  There are Victorian houses with porches, Arts & Crafts bungalows, ranch houses, trailers, Colonials, and pre-fab houses.  Some of it is pretty--blueish light on snow--some of it is junky and ugly.  There are meth labs on the outskirts.  One reason I've always hated Garrison Keillor country is that it doesn't exist.   It's a little scary to go to the restaurant and find that everyone in town has your "data."  They all know the drama. You cannot say anything without the whole town's knowing it.  It's like e-mail.


Everyone knew what had happened at the hospital almost before I did.  People brought coffee in the morning and called to find out how I was doing.  


People in cities are also kind, but the experience in a SMALL small town is different. People REALLY socialize.  It can be reassuring or devastating.


What was I reading?

Mostly I was observing people with their e-devices in hospital rooms. I saw iPhones, e-books, iPads, cell phones, and things I couldn't even identify.  In the evening I read parts of Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.  This is a brilliant satire of a dystopian future where everyone is tuned constantly into  apparati (computer-phone-things which everyone has to carry or be arrested as a traitor).  The dystopia is a reality where attention is fragmented by cyber-lives and Lenny can't right away figure out how to use a new apparat (my problem with a borrowed sleek cell phone is because even the person who lent it doesn't know how to work it). Lenny, the 39-year-old youth-worshipping second-generation immigrant Jewish hero, works for an eternal life society.  He, however, does not qualify for post-human services because he isn't Aryan, isn't healthy enough, and his "fuckability" is measured on his apparat as low.  It doesn't help that he is the only person who reads books (a suspicious activity:  books "smell.)  

"I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation:  that books smell.  And yet, in preparation for the eventual arrival of Eunice Park, I decided to be safe and sprayed some Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast int he vicinity of my tomes, fanning the atomized juices with my hands in the direction of their spines."

His much younger new girlfriend, Eunice, is second-generation Korean and her father is abusive.  She and Lenny met in Italy whence they have returned to a fragmented totalitarian United States whose dominance has been usurped by China and even Korea.  Eunice is shallow:  she spends all her time sending GlobalTeens messages to friends and relatives, has flunked her LSAT, and does nothing except shop for underwear.  She is intimidated by Lenny's reading.  She "scans" books occasionally.


Booksellers should market this both as literary fiction and science fiction.  Shteyngart is a 20-under-40 New Yorker writer and doesn't need that genre support, but this is cross-over, and my science fiction club would like it.

In Case You're Wondering

In case you're wondering about my reading plan, bravely announced on January 4, I admire my stack of books. Needless to say, I haven't stuck to this list.  I have added and subtracted desultorily.  

Finished:  Nadine Gordimer's A World of Strangers. Gordimer's stunning second novel examines the changing political views of a cynical Englishman in Johannesburg.

In Progress :  Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, R. F. Delderfield's Theirs Was the Kingdom, and Helen Vendler's Emily Dickinson:  Selected Poems and Commentaries.
 
 All great!

Rejected:  Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.  Li is a 20-under-40 at the New Yorker. I admit I think the New Yorker has gone downhill.  The first story in the collection, about a Chinese lesbian soldier, seems chilly and distant. 

George Meredith's The Amazing Marriage.

Added to List:  Olivia Manning's School for Love (Finished:  I posted about it Sunday).

Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower:  The Fall of Anne Boleyn and Jean Plaidy's Murder Most Royal (a biography and a historical novel. I haven't gone insane: Plaidy's historical novel actually complements the biography.)

Robin Black's If I Love You, I Would Tell You 

Middlemarch


 Antonya Nelson's Bound

So I'm curious:  how many people stick to their reading plans?  My list is mutable. I read Nadine Gordimer and get interested in political fiction.  Or I see something at the bookstore and break my vow not to buy books.  

I wonder how people are doing on spending, too.  YOU'RE MY HERO IF YOU DON'T BUY BOOKS!  I'd never buy a book if I weren't bewitched by book reviewers (who get free books so are unreliable because they want to make friends or enemies, and it's hard to sort out what's what :) ).

A Girl Thing: Victoria Holt & Jean Plaidy Are the Same Woman

Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, aka Jean Plaidy & Victoria Holt

I almost left a bookstore with a box of Victoria Holt novels.  I very much liked the idea.  The clerk and I agreed the mass-market paperbacks were "like new" but she wanted to get rid of them.  

"I can cut you a deal."

Nobody needs a box of Victoria Holt. My husband thought it very strange that a lover of classics would want to read Gothic novels with cover blurbs like the following:

"Lovely Ellen Kellaway knew very little about her past.  Orphaned as a child and taken in by her arrogant cousin as a 'poor relation,' she was grateful when the handsome young son of a wealthy family asked for her hand..."

I think you will agree it's a girl thing.

Victoria Holt turns out to have been Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, the author of 200 novels under eight pseudonyms, the most famous being Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, and Philippa Carr.  By the time of her death, Plaidy's historical novels sold 14 million copies worldwide, according to Fantastic Fiction.

I realized I'd never read Plaidy, I thought.  And I had a copy of Murder Most Royal.  I'll read my Victoria Holt later.

So, guess what?  I'm hooked on Jean Plaidy.

Murder Most Royal is the fifth in her 11-volume Tudor Saga. Websites sort these by order of kings and queens, not by publication date.  Murder Most Royal is actually the first, published in 1948.  

Plaidy's novel is the story of Anne Boleyn (Henry VIII's second wife) and Catherine Howard (her cousin, and Henry VIII's fifth wife). According to Plaidy's novel, which pretty much complements the biographies, with some divergences, Anne was brilliant, manipulative, and politically shrewd.  Wanting power, she did not have sex with Henry till he took serious steps to divorce poor Katharine of Aragon, his devout first wife who did not have a son. When the Pope wouldn't approve the divorce from Katharine, Henry, encouraged by Cardinal Wolsey, broke from the church.  When Anne was pregnant, she and Henry had a private wedding.  

Anne has her enemies:  among them Cardinal Wolsey, her Uncle Norfolk (whose own daughter was once a mistress of Henry), and Princess Mary.  She has lesser enemies of whom she is not aware:  Jane, her sister-in-law, who is envious of Anne's power.  Anne lives for politics, not for love.

Catherine is a much simpler creature:  can't read, is pretty, and is introduced to sex young when she lives at her grandmother's house in a dormitory of ladies who meet their lovers by night.  It is easy to see she will be a pawn of Henry when she grows up.  

What I really like about Plaidy's book are her historical insights .  This is not strictly a romance--it's not romantic at all, since Anne can't follow her instincts, and Henry gets rid of the young man she loves.  

Cardinal Wolsey, who rose from almoner to the Lord Chancellor and more or less ran the king's court, is one of the most interesting characters.  Plaidy points out that "his true religion was statecraft."  And she shows us how he thinks in a few choice paragraphs.  Actually, I would like to read a whole novel about him. The pre-Cromwell Wolf Hall...

Plaidy writes of Wolsey:

"He was well hated, as only the successful man can be hated by the unsuccessful.  That he had risen from humble circumstances made the hatred stronger.  'We are as good as this man!'  'With his luck, there I might have gone!'  So whispered the people..."

"The cardinal was brooding on the secret matter of the King's.  It was for him to smooth the way for his master, to get him what he desired at the earliest possible moment, and he who had piloted his state ship past many dangerous rocks was now dismayed.  Well he could agree with His Majesty that the marriages of kings and queens depend for their success on the male issue, and what had his King and Queen to show for years of marriage but one daughter!"

I'm very much enjoying this entertaining novel and recommend it for leisure hours.  So much fun to read!

Olivia Manning's School for Love

Olivia Manning's School for Love is a short, horrifying, agonizing yet slyly witty novel reminiscent of the psychological fiction of Patrick Hamilton and L. P. Hartley.  If you've read Manning's masterpieces, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, novels following the fortunes of an intellectual couple during World War II in Romania, Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Syria, you may be surprised by the less ambitious scope of School for Love (now available in an NYRB edition, with an introduction by Jane Smiley).  Yet it is a perfect small novel in its way, and addresses both the fortunes of war and the desperation of a group of strangers as seen through the eyes of an adolescent.

The novel is set in a rooming house in 1945 in Palestine run by a mad landlady, who both starves her tenants and keeps the house freezing.  I've always enjoyed novels set in rooming houses, perhaps because I once lived in a rented room, and though there was no landlady to contend with, I spent a lot of time the kitchen-attic eating ramen noodles (did we ever eat anything else?) with a group of disparate roomers I became fond of who ranged from construction workers to artists to education majors to dental students.  

But rooming houses in literature are grungier, or at least more uncomfortable, than mine was. Think of Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude (reviewed here at Tony's Book Blog), or the makeshift living arrangements of Barbara Pym's two indexers, Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace, who briefly room together in the  house Dulcie inherited from her middle-class parents, in No Fond Return of Love. 

In School for Love, Felix, a teenage boy, is adrift after his mother dies in Baghdad.  No one wants him, and he ends up in Jerusalem, living in a rooming house run by a miserly step-relative, Miss Bohun, who is also head of a mysterious fundamentalist Christian cult waiting for the rapture.  

Felix didn't know what to expect.  

"Now he knew there was not a chance she would be like his mother. For one thing, she was years older; she was older even than his father, who had always seemed elderly and remote.  Although she was not related to him--Miss Bohun had been an adopted child of his father's parents--Felix was afraid she might resemble his father.  Another thing, Miss Bohun was a person whom his mother had not wanted to visit.  Whenever his father had suggested a trip to Jerusalem, his mother had said: 'Oh no, dear one, not there.  We'd have to see Ethel Bohun.  I couldn't bear it.'"

Soon we understand why his mother did not want to see her.  Miss Bohun specializes in "saving" refugees and ancient pensioners, renting them rooms, starving them with cheap rations, regarding them briefly as family, and then throwing them out.  Her housekeeper, Frau Leszno, and her beautiful son, Nikki, are Jewish refugees who once had the lease of the house.  Then Miss Bohun moved in, gradually took over, kicked them out of their rooms, and demoted them to servants.  She quarrels with them incessantly because they do not graciously act as her inferiors.  And they are an unlikable pair, not idealized.  But Miss Bohun's paranoia and stinginess make the house a kind of hell.

A harried bureaucrat gives Felix short lessons and denigrates his poor education--he knows no Latin, poor boy.   Felix doesn't care, but he has nothing to do, so he sits in his freezing room studying and playing with the cat all day.  In the attic a retired man paints flowers and is thrown out after he invites a woman to the house.  Miss Bohun, who tutors English when she isn't running her Christian meetings, is sure everyone is taking advantage of her.  Her miserly measures--substituting fried eggplant for sardines, not lighting the fire, and stealing the milk of a pregnant woman--are over-the-top.

These desperate people have nowhere to go, and Felix makes friends with Miss Bohan because he has no one else.  But when Mrs. Ellis, a beautiful young widow, moves in, Felix falls in love with her and begins to see a different point of view.  Mrs. Ellis despises Miss Bohan, which sometimes makes Felix feel guilty, and she and Miss Bohan battle for the house.  Miss Bohan had implied to Mrs. Ellis that she would hand over the lease to her in the fall--a typical ploy for her to get a roomer. 

But which is better?  The miserly religious nut, or the widow who sees everything so cynically? 

Well!