Of Books and Bicycles

The Mapping of Love and Death is Jacqueline Winspear’s latest Maisie Dobbs novel. I’ll admit at this point that this series isn’t wowing me, exactly, although I do want to keep reading the latest installments, just to see where it goes. The Maisie Dobbs books are good ones to turn to at this particular point of the year, when I’m tired and busy and ready for the end of the school year, but the end of the school year is still so far away. At this point I need something familiar and absorbing and not terribly challenging, and Maisie Dobbs is just the thing.

The series doesn’t wow me for two reasons, basically, one of which is that the plots have begun to feel lackluster. I’m not one to read much for plot, though, so this is okay. The historical context and the character development are more interesting, so that’s good. The other problem, though, is that I get irritated by the way Maisie uses her unusually strong powers of intuition to figure out who committed the crime. This feels too much like cheating. Yes, Maisie is smart and has the powers of deduction we would expect of a detective, but still she relies too heavily on feelings of foreboding that come over her whenever something significant is about to happen.

But, on the other hand, I do want to know what happens to Maisie, having followed her story this far, and the book is satisfying in that regard. Significant things happen to her, and I’m glad I know about them. For a much better, much more thorough review, read Danielle’s thoughts here.

On to other bookish things: I finished Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette and never wrote much about it, and at this point, I’ve forgotten too much about the novel to have much to say. I’ll just say that I didn’t like it much and move on. I’m not ready to give up on Balzac entirely, though, as surely I’m missing something? I’m not one to dismiss a classic author quite so easily just because I failed with him once. So some day perhaps I’ll pick up a shorter novel of his, if there is one, and see if my mind has changed.

I just now finished W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, but more thoughts on that later, as the Slaves of Golconda are discussing the book this Wednesday. I am also in the middle of David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I am enjoying it immensely. I have read five of the book’s seven essays (many of them quite long), and I think every one of them is great. Wallace is a writer who can make any subject interesting. I just finished an essay on the film director David Lynch and I loved it, even though if I’ve ever seen a Lynch film I don’t remember it. There’s another great essay on the Illinois State Fair and another one on tennis, math, the midwest, and wind. The other two I’ve read are more literary in nature, one of them a pre-Infinite Jest essay that shows Wallace thinking through some of the ideas that made their way into the novel. It’s all excellent, and I haven’t even gotten to the title essay yet, probably his most famous essay of them all. It’s crossing my mind now and then that I might want to reread Infinite Jest soon. I don’t know if I will, but I am tempted. It’s just such a fabulous novel.

I didn’t expect to love Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife as much as I did. I liked her first book Prep quite a lot, so I know she’s an author whose sensibility speaks to me, but I thought this book was even better than the previous one. Now, I listened to this on audio, and I tend to like books I listen to more readily than those I read, so I’m not sure how reliable my response is, exactly, but still, I spent several weeks looking forward to the time when I could get in the car to listen to a little bit more of the story.

As I wrote about here, reading this book was an odd experience because I never expected to enjoy being in the company of characters who are modeled on George and Laura Bush. But, while the George character was often irritating (though not as much as I would have expected, given how I feel about the real-life person), Alice, the one modeled on Laura, was a fascinating person whom I came to admire.

Alice is a first-person narrator, and she tells her life story up until about 1 1/2 years from the end of Charlie’s (George’s) second term as president. I was talking to a friend recently about how knowing the trajectory a novel will follow — that we will move from Alice’s childhood up through the time she becomes first lady — can get dull, but in this case it wasn’t. As soon as she met Charlie, I knew who he was and that she would marry him, and, of course, I knew that he would be politically successful beyond her wildest dreams. But the story of their journey to the White House was enthralling the entire way, all because of Alice’s thoughtful, careful, measured, and balanced voice. That description doesn’t sound enthralling, I know, but when extraordinary things happen to someone who thinks and talks kind of like I do and whom I feel I could be friends with, I’m drawn in.

The first extraordinary thing that happens to Alice is something tragic: at 17, while driving to a party, she ran a stop sign and hit a car driven by a high school classmate, Andrew Imhof, with whom she was just beginning to realize she couldpossibly fall in love. This tragedy follows her for the rest of her life, not just because she was responsible for someone else’s death, but because she could never know whether their relationship would have blossomed into romance, had he lived. What, she thinks later, if she and Andrew had married and she had become a farmer’s wife? She may never have met Charlie in that case, much less married him and become the first lady.

But marrying Andrew is not what happened, and instead when Alice meets Charlie, the two fall for each other hard. They are engaged in six weeks and married in a few months. In so many ways, Charlie is perfect for Alice — he is funny and gregarious and light-hearted, to balance out her seriousness and thoughtfulness. He is confident and carefree, to balance her worried and insecure nature. She makes him a little more serious, while he helps her loosen up. Their differing traits attract them to each other, but, not surprisingly, they become a source of conflict over time, and eventually Alice comes to question the choice she made.

Or was it even a choice? There is a sense in which Alice was pulled into that relationship by forces beyond her knowledge, or perhaps it was her unconscious that led her there. At any rate, she thinks deeply about why she did what she did, and why people do what they do, and the extent to which any of us have any real say in the course of our lives.

These questions become even more urgent when she finds herself as First Lady and wife of a husband who has taken the country to war, in highly questionable circumstances. How in the world did she end up there? And what is she supposed to do now? What are her responsibilities, given that she’s not entirely sure that the war is right — or that it is wrong? And what exactly does she owe her husband’s administration? Should she hide her true feelings if they conflict with administration talking points?

American Wife covers a lot of ground, moving from small-town middle-class Wisconsin to the upper-class Wisconsin sanctuaries where Charlie’s family resides (Sittenfeld changed some key details — I don’t know how many, in fact, and it would be interesting to know), to the campaign trail, to the Governor’s mansion, to the White House. The wonder of it, to Alice, is that she is the same person through it all. How does an average middle-class midwestern woman who never in her wildest dreams would have thought she could become as powerful and famous as she became end up where she did? This question never ceases to puzzle Alice, and I loved the book’s implication that this is only an extreme version of the question that plagues us all. How in the world did any of us end up in the places we did?

My mystery book group met last night to discuss Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a book that indicates we are branching out a bit from mystery fiction to crime fiction more generally. Detectives appear in Highsmith’s book, but only briefly, and they aren’t very good. They are pretty foolish, in fact. The real star of the book is Tom Ripley, the murderer.

What a wonderful, difficult, bizarre book this is. I loved it, but it left me feeling anxious and vaguely guilty, as though I’d done something wrong myself. The reason for this is that the story is told from a very close third-person perspective that leaves the reader in Tom’s consciousness the entire time, with no relief. It’s such a disturbing consciousness that I was both fascinated by the person that Tom is, and deeply unsettled.

As the novel opens, Tom finds himself followed by a man who turns out to be the father of an acquaintance. Tom was worried that the man was following him because of the tax fraud Tom had recently committed (he sent out letters to people telling them they owed more in taxes — just for fun and to see what would happen), but it turns out he wants Tom to travel to Europe to try to bring his son Dickie back home to run the family business. Tom soon figures out that even though he doesn’t know Dickie as well as his father thinks he does, this is a great opportunity to live in the lap of luxury for a while.

He meets Dickie in a small, coastal Italian town and quickly becomes a part of his life. He and Dickie’s friend Marge spend their days swimming, sunbathing, and eating long and luxurious meals. Tensions soon develop, though: Tom is devoted to Dickie but jealous of Marge, while Marge decides that Tom is a bad influence on Dickie and treats him coldly and suspiciously. This love triangle of a sort (Marge is in love with Dickie, although he appears not to return the feeling, and Tom is obsessed with Dickie to a degree that is obvious but ambiguous in nature) gets more and more complicated until one day Tom, in a fit of jealousy and worried that Dickie is pushing him away, kills him in horrifically bloody fashion in a boat on the ocean.

What’s so awful about this murder is that it’s so senseless, so horrible, and yet to Tom it’s simply an unfortunate action that he had little control over. Once the idea entered his mind, he knew there was little he could do except follow through. He’s not remorseful at all, just cautious about what to do next. What he does is become Dickie himself, stepping into his shoes, forging his signature to collect his money, and living the life that Dickie might have lived.

Tom not only lacks any moral sense, but he lacks any sense of himself at all; he’s a cipher, an empty shell who is incapable of caring for another person. He is extremely isolated. The people around him are pawns in his personal game or they are nobodies to be gotten rid of if necessary. What Tom has — or what he wants to have — in place of any sense of self or any emotional connection to others is objects and money. Once he has taken Dickie’s place, he enjoys himself extremely well wearing Dickie’s clothes, eating fabulous meals alone in expensive restaurants, and traveling across Europe seeing the sights. As long as he has the objects that make up the right kind of identity, it doesn’t matter to him that the identity is a sham. For him, it’s real, or, at any rate, it’s enough.

He slips into the role of Dickie frighteningly easily, and not only that, but he quickly forgets what it was like to be Tom:

It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it.

It’s possible to say that this is a psychological exploration of a sociopath, but I think the book resists psychological explanations and is therefore even more chilling. The narrator explains that Tom lost his parents when he was young and that he was raised by an emotionally abusive aunt. But this history is told so quickly, with so few details, that it’s almost as if Highsmith is playing with our need for an explanation, making fun of it by providing us with one so unsatisfactory. There’s no real reason for Tom, no way of explaining him or of avoiding him.

As other members of my book group said, I loved the book, but I don’t necessarily want to read more of the book in the series or even more of Highsmith’s work at all. It’s good — very good — but so disturbing it’s hard to subject oneself to it.

I’m not quite halfway through listening to Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife and I’m enjoying it immensely, but I’m also finding it to be a really odd emotional experience. I’m enjoying it so much I’m tempted to get the audiobook out of the car and listen to it in the house, which is something I never, ever do. I’m caught up in Alice Lindgren’s voice, her thoughtful, careful, smart way of thinking about everything that happens to her.

The weird emotional experience part began when Alice met Charlie Blackwell, whom she has not yet married, but has become engaged to. Remember how this is the book that’s really about Laura Bush, even though the names and some of the circumstances are changed? That makes Charlie Blackwell George Bush, although his family is from Wisconsin, not from Texas. And reading about Charlie Blackwell/George Bush as a romantic lead has been bizarre.

It’s probably no surprise that I’m anything but a George Bush fan — I can’t stand the man, in fact. And yet in the context of this book, he’s … well, obnoxious quite a lot, but also sometimes charming. And every time I think he does something even a little bit charming, I have this moment where I think, ew! That’s George Bush! Ew! He’s awful, not charming in the least!

And yet in the context of the book, it makes sense that Alice is attracted to him. He is a lot of things that she is not — outgoing, confident, determined, at ease with people — and they make a good pair in some ways. And I like Alice a lot. In fact, she is in some ways kind of like me, or at least I feel some kinship with her. Her way of thinking and acting is familiar to me. But … she married George Bush! Ew!

There are lots of moments where Charlie/George does something utterly obnoxious such as order Alice around, get mad at her if she isn’t politically supportive enough, or assume she’s going to drop her career for his sake, and then I have fun getting annoyed and yelling at him for being the jerk that he is. But then they make up, and I understand that Alice is happy once again, and that’s a good thing, because I like Alice, but it means she’s happy with George Bush. Ick! And then there are the sex scenes, which are the weirdest of all …

This book has been an interesting imaginative exercise, as it makes me think about how someone I like could be attracted to someone I most definitely don’t, and how the person I most definitely don’t like can sometimes be likable. And also how a sometimes likable person is capable of doing awful things, like start the Iraq war. I’m very curious to see what Sittenfeld does with the rest of the story; the couple isn’t even married yet and the presidency is way off in the future.

I’ve had a mixed experienced with audio books so far this year; the first one I finished I loved at first and was bored with by the end. I’m in the middle of my second one now and can’t wait to hear more.

I was looking forward to the first one, Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, having heard excellent things about it. And it might have worked better if I read it rather than listened to it. I’m still not sure which type of book works best on audio; while I’ve enjoyed listening to mystery and detective fiction in the past, in the last six months or so a couple of examples haven’t worked well for me, and I’m beginning to wonder whether the genre is tricky to listen to. The Manual of Detection didn’t work well and Agatha Christie didn’t either, while Maisie Dobbs worked great, as did P.D. James. I’m thinking that perhaps the more plot-driven books are harder to listen to, while the slower-paced ones that focus a lot on character and setting work better.

I started off enjoying The Manual of Detection. It’s opening is dark and atmospheric, with a strange, noirish mood to it. It’s set in an unknown city where it’s always raining, and the main character, Charles Unwin, rides to work on a bicycle complete with an umbrella to keep him dry. He’s a clerk in a large detective agency, and he’s very happy with his job processing the reports of a detective he’s never met Travis Sivart. The detective agency is a cold, mechanistic place where people follow strict rules and focus only on their own specialized tasks, nothing else. We learn nothing about any private life Charles Unwin might have; he’s basically a cipher, and he’s perfectly happy to stay that way. When he finds himself unexpectedly promoted to the rank of detective, the only thing he wants is his old job and his old peaceful life back.

All that was excellent; I loved the mood and the tone of the book. But then as Unwin tries to find Sivart in order to return everything to normal, the plot gets odder and odder, more and more fantastical, and I started to lose interest. I’m not quite sure whether it was the plot that didn’t work for me, the fantastical element, or the fact that I was listening to it, but by the end, I was only half paying attention. It was a disappointment.

Now I’m listening to Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel American Wife, and I’m mesmerized. It’s a loose, fictionalized retelling of the life of Laura Bush, and I’m loving its slow, thoughtful pace and tone. The main character is named Alice, and she’s intriguing, in an odd, dull sort of way — she’s careful, quiet, bookish, and independent, not that exciting of a main character, and yet awful things happen to her and soon enough she will become a really well-known and important person (I haven’t gotten to that part yet). It’s fascinating to watch her respond to everything life throws at her.

So, perhaps I need to give up listening to plot-driven mysteries and focus on slow-paced character-driven novels instead?

I really loved Elizabeth Strout’s book Olive Kitteridge. This is the first book of linked stories I’ve read, and I liked the genre more than I expected to. I’m not sure whether this is because Strout does a particularly good job with it or because I like the genre for itself, but in this case it worked beautifully. I can be uncertain about reading short story collections because it feels as though they require so much energy: you have to orient yourself to new characters and new situations each and every time. You have to do that with linked stories too, but with Olive Kitteridge there is enough to tie all the stories together that I felt a sense of coherence and wholeness that was satisfying.

Olive herself is the main thread that ties the book together, although there are others; she appears in each chapter, sometimes as the main character and sometimes only briefly, as a minor character in someone else’s story. The first chapter is from the point of view of Olive’s husband, Henry, a man other people in their town feel pity for, because Olive is known for being difficult — moody, unhappy, harsh, critical. But Henry, in spite of longings he feels for other kinds of relationships, loves her, a love that is a source of mystery for other characters and for the reader, too.

Olive lives in the town of Crosby, on the coast of Maine, which is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else and secrets are hard to keep. She was a junior high math teacher — retired now — of the sort who terrified her students with her prickly teaching persona. She and Henry have one son, Christopher, whom they both love deeply, but not necessarily in a healthy way; he feels that she has smothered him and it’s no surprise when his new wife whisks him off to California, to get as far away from the in-laws as possible.

One of the things that is so wonderful about the book and about how Strout uses the linked story structure is that we get a satisfyingly complex view of the characters. In one story — one of my favorites — we see into Olive’s mind on her son’s wedding day and watch her as she struggles with having to let her son go to a woman she does not like and listen to that woman mock the dress she is proud of. In other stories, though, we see what other characters think of her — the way they dismiss or fear or marvel at her — and we can compare what it’s like to be someone with a rich and complicated interior life and to see that person from the outside, understanding some things and being bewildered by others. We can see what Olive means to a whole range of people — that she can be a figure of fun, a tragic figure, an overbearing and frightening woman one wants to run away from. And we can also see that she frequently has no idea of all those perceptions people have of her. Other people have no idea what she thinks and feels and suffers, except for glimpses now and then.

Many of the stories are sad, although in a way that is recognizable and true, not overdone. They are about longing, love, relationships gone bad, new relationships attempted, relationships that survive, remarkably; in some cases they are about violence, death, and loss — about a whole range of things that can and do happen to people living together in one place.

The place itself is another thread that holds the book together. Olive and Henry have built their house together and have also built a house for their son, and it is no surprise that they are deeply shaken when their son escapes to California. It’s no surprise that he needs to escape, either. That house was intended as an act of love, but it couldn’t help but appear to Christopher as a prison, Olive’s attempt to keep him at her side, following in her footsteps. Other characters come and go, figuring out who they are as they define themselves against the town that has shaped them. The town changes, but it remains an isolated place that’s beautiful and distinctive, and that is hard to really leave behind.

So yes, I loved this book. It’s beautifully written, emotionally complex, full of nuanced characters, and moving in the stories it tells.

Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper was an enjoyable book in moments and a puzzling book in others; it’s one of those books I can’t quite figure out how to respond to, and I’m not sure another reading would help. There’s a lot I liked in the book, but what puzzles me about it is that given the books that appeal to me most, I should love this one, and it turns out I don’t, quite.

I admire its form and structure most; it’s the kind of novel where not much happens and instead we have someone sharing her thoughts with us the entire way through. The main character is called Pompey, and she writes in a way that seems spontaneous, telling us whatever is on her mind at the moment. We hear about her job — she works as a secretary for a certain Sir Phoebus —  her love affairs, her friends, her family — especially her aunt, the “Lion of Hull” — and her thoughts about society, literature, and politics.

Basically, there is no form or structure (as far as I can tell), and instead it’s a loose-flowing stream-of-consciousness monologue. Novel on Yellow Paper reminds me most of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist, where there is a structure and plot, but these are so basic they hardly count and the real point of the book is the voice. The pleasure of the book comes from listening to the main character share his thoughts. That’s what we’re offered in Smith’s book — a chance to get inside the main character’s head a little bit.

However, now that I think about it a little more, I’m not sure how much we do get inside Pompey’s head. It’s feels a little more like she uses words to charm and entertain us and to tell us about herself, but in such a way that she hides as much as she reveals. Words are as much a shield for her true self, or a cloud in which to hide, as a way to reveal herself.

She certainly is amusing and charming, and she has funny quirks that make her voice very distinctive. This passage illustrates her use of repetition and rhythm and also shows how frank and open she can be (or appear to be):

Oh how I enjoy sex and oh how I enjoy it. There have been many funny things about sex in my life that have made me laugh and so now I will tell you.

There was once a woman called Miss Hogmanimy. That was certainly a queer name. That was a name you would certainly want to get married out of. But this woman was very queer and wrought up over babies and the way babies are born, and she gave up her whole life going round giving free lectures on how babies are born. And it certainly was queer how ecstatic she got about this way how babies are born, and always she was giving lectures to young girls of school or school-leaving age. And all the time it was mixed up in a way I don’t just remember with not drinking, not drinking alcohol, but just carrying on ginger beer, kola and popgass. And so well this Miss Hogmanimy she got up in our school, now I think it was our school, chapel and so there she was in this school chapel, giving a lecture with illustrating slides to young girls on how babies are born …

…to listen to Miss Hogmanimy you’d think just knowing straight out how babies was born was to solve all the problems of adolescence right off. You’d come out straight and simple and full of hearty fellowship and right thinking if you just got it clear once and for all how babies are born. There’d be no more coming out in spots and getting self-conscious about the senior prefect, nor getting a crush on the English mistress, nor feeling proud and miserable like you do at that time, before you get grown up. There’d be none of this at all if you just knew how babies are born. So there she was.

Pompey is great at this kind of amusing light satire. There is a wonderful section on women’s fiction where she describes the typical “Fiction for the Married Woman,” which is all about learning to be happy with housewifely duties. The section is funny, but there is anger underneath the light surface. She decides that describing fiction for the unmarried woman is just too painful:

I cannot tell you about the stories for unmarried girls, the ones that are so cleverly and coyly oh. And they are so bright and smiling and full of pretty ideas that are all the time leading up to washing-up. You will know how they go but I cannot tell you. I am already feeling: No, I should not have said all this. It is the ugliest thing that could ever have been conceived, because it is also so trivial, so full of the negation of human intelligence, that should be so quick and so swift and so glancing, and so proud. And you Reader, whom I have held by the wrist and forced to listen, I am full of regret for you, because I have forced you to listen to this.

As I type out these passages, I’m thinking about how much I like them and how much I liked quite a few sections of the book. The phrase “so full of the negation of human intelligence” is just great, as is the apology to the reader (I wrote about another great section here).

The problem is that in between these sections I felt impatient and occasionally irritated. I couldn’t follow the way her mind worked very well, and the picture of who Pompey is and what her life is like remained hazy. I wanted a more coherent picture to come together, even if that took a while. I love voice-driven novels where plot is not the focus, but I think I need just a bit more coherence, direction, and forward-movement than I got here.

I also just don’t know anybody who talks like Pompey does or who thinks like she does, and I found her a little hard to believe. I suspect, to be really simple and non-literary-critical about things, that Pompey and I probably wouldn’t be friends. With this kind of novel, I want to be able to imagine having a conversation with the main character, and I’m having trouble imagining it here.

So, to sum up, it’s an original, puzzling, strange, frustratingly quirky book I would have loved to love.

You can read other posts on the novel here and join in the discussion at the forums here.