Tag: American fiction

Atlantic Books, Author, BIPOC 2021, Book review, Bryan Washington, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, USA

‘Memorial’ by Bryan Washington

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Atlantic Books; 284 pages; 2021.

After reading what feels like a trillion novels about young 20-something women trying to sort out their lives in the 21st century, how refreshing to read a novel from the male perspective!

Bryan Washington’s Memorial is about two gay men from diverse backgrounds trying to decide whether to commit to each other or not. Both have complicated relationships with their parents (particularly their fathers), which adds to their emotional impotence, and neither seems able to express the three simple words we all long to hear: “I love you”.

It’s written in a restrained style, albeit with plenty of sex scenes and lavish descriptions of food (if you are not hungry before reading this book, you will be during it). And it’s free of speech marks, which seems to be a “thing” in all the new novels I have been reading lately.

Relationship rut

The story is focused on two men who are in a relationship rut. Benson is a middle-class Black man working in childcare, while Mike is from a lower-class Japanese background (but raised in the US) and is now employed as a chef.

Their relationship is told in three parts. The first, from Benson’s perspective, details what happens when Mike’s mother arrives for a holiday on the same day her son flies to Japan to visit his dying father. This leaves Benson alone with his almost-mother-in-law, a woman he’s never met before let alone shared a house with and had to entertain. Their odd-couple interactions are awkward — “So, how long have you been sleeping with my son?” — but eventually morph into something resembling friendship.

The second part is told from Mike’s point of view and charts his time in Osaka with his ill father, Eiju, who runs a small bar that his son will inherit, while the third part shifts back to Benson’s perspective before ending on a hopeful note.

Well-rounded look at a relationship

Nothing earth-shattering happens in this book. The plot is thin and occasionally moves ahead through text messages or via photographs snapped on Smartphones (some of which are reproduced in the novel).

Sometimes a little nugget of information is dropped into the narrative or someone says something particularly scathing — “You’re trash, he said. Great, I said. That’s big of you. You came from trash, and you’ll always be trash” — which alters our perspectives on the characters. This is a great device for allowing us to understand both Benson and Mike’s motives and thoughts, to see how their actions and behaviours impact the other person, giving us a more rounded version of them as a couple.

Like the much-lauded work of Sally Rooney, Memorial is a story that simply explores human relationships and the ways in which entanglements with lovers, friends, family and colleagues shape our lives. And it looks at decision making: how our actions have consequences and being an adult is about accepting responsibility for the things we do and say. (Even the dads in this story have to grow into this idea.)

Washington also turns his eye to commitment. What is it, and is it worth pursuing? How do we plan for a future together if we don’t know what that future holds?

One night, I asked Ben what he wanted. We steeped on the top of our mattress like tea bags. The A/C wheezed overhead. Ben sat up. He smiled. Honestly, he said, I hadn’t expected this to be anything. Oh, I said. Yeah. Whatever happens, happens. Isn’t that what you wanted? I want whatever’s best for both of us, I said. There’s no best. Things just happen.

This is my 10th book for #BIPOC2021, which is my plan to read more books by black, Indigenous and people of colour this year. 

Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Sigrid Nunez, USA, Virago

‘The Last of Her Kind’ by Sigrid Nunez

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Fiction – paperback; Virago; 416 pages; 2019.

No sooner had I read the first few pages of Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind than I knew it was going to be one of my favourite books of the year.

It’s the kind of immersive, entertaining life saga I really love to read, and the setting — New York in the late 1960s — is so evocatively depicted I felt like I was really experiencing first hand that time and place.

Coupled with a confident, dazzling prose style and a brilliant cast of strong characters, I knew I was in safe hands and would thoroughly enjoy the ride.

A college friendship

The book charts the friendship between two wildly different young women who meet as college roommates at Columbia University in 1968.

Ann Drayton is an only child who comes from a rich, upper-class background but is so ashamed of her unearned privilege that she turns her back on it, beginning college life with one aim: to socialise and befriend people from the lower classes.

Georgette George comes from the other end of the social spectrum, has grown up in poverty, but has a “set of brains” and wants to make something of herself, if only to escape her underprivileged background.

The pair share a room, but it is an uneasy, almost one-sided friendship, for Ann is domineering, self-assured and politicised, while George is introverted, wary and lacking in confidence. But over time George, who narrates the story, grows to like her roomie, especially her unwavering acceptance of her, and the ways in which she opens up her world — and associated world view.

The intensity of the friendship does, eventually, come to a head, when the pair have a full-blown argument that results in a major falling out.

But that is not the end of the story, because some six or seven years after the fight, when neither of them has bothered to remedy the situation, Ann is arrested for the murder of a policeman. George finds this situation so unbelievable and alarming, she analyses their shared history in almost forensic detail, trying to unravel the clues that might indicate why Ann could commit such a heinous act.

Truly engaging story

The Last of Her Kind is ambitious in structure and utilises a pastiche of styles to create a truly engaging story, one that I kept thinking about every time I (reluctantly) put down the book.

It is an unflinching account of power and privilege in America, seen through the very personal lens of female friendship. As well as highlighting how our family history and early adult relationships can shape the course of our lives, it looks at how romantic idealism, martyrdom and activism can collide with outcomes we might not expect.

It’s a truly compelling story about all kinds of issues — social justice, race and poverty, to name but a few — but it does it in such an authentic and nuanced way it never feels heavy-handed. (The only bit of the story I wasn’t quite sure about was the chapter told from the point of view of a prisoner, which didn’t feel quite as convincing as everything that went before, but that’s just a minor issue.)

It’s very much a book about human nature and all kinds of interpersonal relationships between parents and children, as well as friends, siblings and lovers.

The Last of Her Kind, which was first published in 2006, is Sigrid Nunez’s fifth novel. Her most recent novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. I have promptly added it to my TBR.

Author, Book review, Fiction, France, James Salter, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting

‘A Sport and a Pastime’ by James Salter

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Fiction – paperback; Picador; 192 pages; 2007.

James Salter is one of those authors I had only ever heard good things about, so when I found A Sport and a Pastime in my local second-hand store (I live a few doors down from Elizabeth’s Bookshop in Fremantle), I couldn’t resist buying it.

First published in 1967, it tells the story of a love affair between an American college dropout and a French shop girl, who go on a road trip across France in the late 1960s. Their liaison, steamy and sordid, is imagined by an unnamed narrator, another American, who spies them from afar and lets his creative juices get the better of him.

It’s a rather strange and beguiling novel, and not quite what I expected. It feels voyeuristic in places, misogynistic in others. Mainly it feels like a writer being a little self-indulgent as he lets his own sexual fantasies dominate the storyline.

But the writing, clear and lucid and full of heartache and a deep sense of longing,  is reminiscent of so many American writers of the era. I’m thinking Richard Yates, William Maxwell and William Styron. It’s a style I admire a lot.

Throughout this short novel, Salter is very good at capturing moods and heightened emotions, of the conversations, pithy and of little consequence, between people, but he really excels at conveying the beauty and history of the landscapes and villages of rural France. A Sport and a Pastime could very well double as a tourism advertisement for the French Tourism Board. Take this as an example:

The blue, indolent town. Its cats. Its pale sky, The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels lying in the corners. The uneven curbstones, their edges worn away. A town of doctors, all with large houses. Cousson, Proby, Gilot. Even the streets are named for them. Passageways through the Roman wall. The Porte de Breuil, its iron railings sunk into the stone like climbers’ spikes. The women come up the steep grade out of breath, their lungs creaking. A town still rich with bicycles. In the mornings they flow softly past. In the streets there’s the smell of bread.

Personally, I admit that I didn’t care much for the storyline, but the luminous prose made up for it. There were many turns of phrase that took my breath away — the line above about the streets smelling of bread is but one example; “over France, a great summer rain, battering the trees, making the foliage ring like tin” is but another — and I felt I was in the hands of an accomplished writer, one who had honed his craft and understood the power of words to enchant and hold the reader captive.

Perhaps A Sport and a Pastime, with its over-emphasis on eroticism and its blurring of the lines between the body and the soul, was not the place to start with Salter. It probably didn’t help that the entire book felt too similar to William Maxwell’s The Château, also written in the 1960s, which I read earlier in the year and found a bit tiresome.

That said, it has certainly made me intrigued enough to read more of his work. If you can recommend any titles, please do leave a comment in the box below.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, general, Kathleen Rooney, New York, Publisher, Setting

‘Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk’ by Kathleen Rooney

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Lillian Boxfish takes a walk

Fiction – Kindle edition; Daunt Books; 302 pages; 2017.

Kathleen Rooney’s Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk is a rather sweet novel about an 84-year-old lady, once America’s highest paid female advertising copywriter, taking a walk around Manhattan on New Year’s Eve in 1984.

As she takes her evening stroll en-route to a party she’s been invited to, she meets and interacts with ordinary New Yorkers and recalls the highs and lows of her extraordinary life and career.

It’s an easy read and nothing too taxing, the exact kind of story I was looking for while I nursed a sore mouth having undergone some rather invasive oral surgery recently. I simply switched the brain into neutral and enjoyed accompanying Lillian around the streets of New York.

Said to be inspired by the life of Margaret Fishback, who worked at R.H. Macy’s and was the highest-paid female advertising copywriter in the world during the 1930s, the book is as much about one woman’s rise to the top of a male-dominated industry as it is about the changing fortunes of Manhattan, from the Prohibition era in the 1920s to sky-high homicide rates in the 1980s.

Admittedly, I didn’t much warm to Lillian, whose tone of voice is forthright and arrogant (what you might call brimming with chutzpah), but her story is such a fascinating one it hardly seemed to matter. Plus, her tale is laced with plenty of self-deprecating humour and great one liners so it’s a fun read — and the advertising poems dotted throughout give a light-hearted tone to the narrative.

Mind you, there are some heart-rending moments, too, which knocks the self-confidence out of Lillian and lets the reader see her in a new, more human, light.

A quotable story

I had a grand old time highlighting passages that appealed to me: the book is dotted with “wisdoms” and viewpoints that chime with my own. I’m a great believer in walking to clear my head, boost my creativity and find solutions to problems. It seems Lillian is too:

Taking to the pavement always helps me find new routes around whatever problem I’m trying to solve: phrases on signs, overheard conversations, the interplay between the rhythms of my verse and the rhythm of my feet.

And Lillian’s preference for living in the city, as opposed to the suburbs, but liking the ability to go on little escapes could have come out of my mouth:

I always wanted either to be in, or get away from the city, not to just be close to the city. Were I off in the pastoral hills shingling my own roof or riding a horse, well then, what fun. And were I catching the subway for a night at the opera, well then, hooray. But in the suburbs I could enjoy none of those pursuits with ease.

Lillian’s at her most poignant when she reflects on how time moves on and things change.

The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

And:

‘The city is a city,’ I say. ‘But it is also a house. This city is my house. I live in this city, and this part is being remodelled. The ceiling of the highway has been pulled down, and the floor’s been extended, and the water’s farther away. But this is my house. It is still my house.’

I also loved her love of literature — she becomes a published poet alongside her advertising career — but she’s also acutely aware of how quickly fame and success can disappear:

In certain instances, walking alone in Manhattan is actually safer at night. Passing by the Strand, for example, at Twelfth and Broadway. I usually walk past that bookstore with intense ambivalence: delight because I have been frequenting it since the 1930s, when it was over on Fourth Avenue, just one among nearly fifty similar shops; dread because on more than one occasion in the past two decades I have found my own poetry collections derelict on the sidewalk carts, on sale for mere cents, and with no one watching over them because if they get stolen, well, who cares? At night, at least, the carts have been rolled away and there’s no chance I’ll be confronted with evidence of my grim literary fate.

But probably my favourite quote is this:

Among the many unsurprising facts of life that, when taken in aggregate, ultimately spell out the doom of our species is this: People who command respect are never as widely known as people who command attention.

Thanks to blogger Susan at A Life in Books for the recommendation.

Author, Book review, Daunt Books, Fiction, Leonard Michaels, literary fiction, New York, Publisher, Setting

‘Sylvia’ by Leonard Michaels

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Sylvia by Leonard Michaels

Fiction – paperback; Daunt Books; 144 pages; 2015.

If literature “ought to be depressing” — as this NYRB Tweet shared by my friend Armen suggests — then Leonard Michael’s 1992 novella, Sylvia, has truly fulfilled its function.

A portrait of a dysfunctional marriage in 1960s Manhattan, this story is about as depressing as they get.

Said to be semi-autobiographical and based on the author’s own bad marriage, it’s a beautifully crafted novel, written in short, to-the-point sentences, but it’s also a terribly sad one.

A fateful relationship

When the book opens we meet the young 20-something nameless narrator. He’s just returned to New York after two years of graduate school in Berkeley “without a PhD or any idea of what I’d do, only a desire to write stories”. He’s now living at home with his Jewish parents in Lower East Side Manhattan, where his mother pampers him and his father thinks he’s a disappointment.

One day he visits his friend Naomi, who lives in Greenwich Village. She’s sharing a rather squalid apartment with a dark-haired Asian woman called Sylvia and it is from this one meeting that a fateful relationship is set in motion.

After being abandoned by Naomi and her boyfriend on a walk through Washington Square Park, the narrator and Sylvia “continued together, as if dazed, drifting through dreamy heat”. They return to the apartment “like a couple doomed to sacrificial assignation” and “made love until afternoon became twilight and twilight became black night”. And that’s when Sylvia nonchalantly mentions she already has a boyfriend.

Infidelity and lustful sex aren’t Sylvia’s only tropes. Our narrator soon learns that Sylvia, who has no immediate family and is essentially all alone in the world, is also wildly unpredictable, argumentative, prone to violent outbursts, jealous rages and self-harming. And yet, for all the difficulties and drama she creates, he cannot seem to say no to her.

He encourages her to go to university, while he struggles to find any paid work. Against his own wisdom, the pair get married. They spend their spare time hanging out in bars, conducting screaming matches or having angry, compulsive sex. Neither of them appears to be happy. It all seems doomed to failure.

A toxic marriage

Written as a retrospective narrative, the book is interspersed with diary extracts of the narrator’s innermost thoughts at the time which includes quotes from Sylvia’s  diatribes to show how cruel and mad she could be. Sadly, these extracts are not laid out any differently to the rest of the text so it’s easy to mistake them as part of the main narrative until you see the tiny date stamp at the end. Using a different font would have easily solved this problem.

That aside, the most interesting thing about Sylvia is its focus on a toxic marriage from the husband’s point of view (instead of the wife’s).

In Sylvia, the narrator is a passive male character, who is constantly manipulated by his “crazy” wife. She uses emotional blackmail to harangue him and makes idle threats to end her life to gain his full attention. It’s heart-rending to read knowing the narrator is caught between the social mores of the time — his parents believe he should stand by his wife no matter what — and his inability to get Sylvia to seek the medical help she so clearly needs.

This is a fast-paced stylish read. Its undertone of latent violence makes it feel like a noirish thriller, but there’s also a raw melancholic power that gives it a mad intensity, almost as if you, the reader, is living through the self-destructive love of this doomed couple. It’s not an easy read, nor a comfortable one, but its shock ending with its nod to redemption makes it worth the effort.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Harper Perennial, literary fiction, Publisher, Ron Hansen, Setting, USA

‘Mariette in Ecstasy’ by Ron Hansen

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Mariette

Fiction – paperback; Harper Perennial; 192 pages; 1992.

“One of the most acclaimed novels of 1991” screams the blurb of this book by acclaimed American writer Ron Hansen.

This doesn’t seem much of a recommendation to me, but how else would you market a book about a bunch of nuns living in a convent in upstate New York in 1906? Doesn’t sound like a particularly inspiring sort of story, does it? And yet this sparse, beautifully written novel, is an exquisite, mesmerising read. Open any page and the words are impeccably arranged to read like poetry.

Wide milk cows are tearing up green shocks of grass in the pasture. Each chews earnestly, like a slow machine, until the roots disappear in her mouth and she goes back to the grass again.

Mariette in Ecstasy is about a 17-year-old girl who joins the Sisters of the Crucifixion, where her much older blood sister is the Reverend Mother. Into this world of extreme religious devotion, Mariette offers a breath of much-needed fresh air. She is young, pretty and full of life. But she is also incredibly devout and believes that she can commune with Jesus to a much higher degree than the other nuns.

When Mariette begins to show signs of divine possession and begins bleeding from wounds in her hands, feet and side that resemble the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, the nuns close ranks. Is it a hoax or a miracle? Is Mariette duping them, or is she a saint?

I don’t think it’s spoiling the plot to point out that the book poses no answers. Hansen leaves it to the reader to make up their own mind, but this is not to say that the conclusion is unsatisfactory. Indeed, I found it to be incredibly clever — and wise.

But the real wisdom (and beauty) of this book is the way that Hansen arranges the story around the religious calendar and the changing seasons. In conveying the minutiae of daily life in a convent, the reader gets a real feel for the tedium and gentle rhythm of the nuns’ existence.

Mariette kneels on ginger-brown earth as she plants winter seeds in a hot-weather garden that Sister Saint-Luc has harrowed and Sister Saint-Pierre has grooved with a stick. Brussels sprouts, kale and savory cabbage. Sister Hermance is just behind her with a tin watering can. Sister Saint-Luc sings the hymn ‘Immaculate Mary’ and the sisters join her.
Hot breezes slide through the bluejoint grass. Sister Sabine is walking behind a horse-pulled thresher in the barley field. When Sister Hermance pours, she sees the water puddle like hot cocoa, but soon it is just a faint stain in the earth. Killdeer kite down and dally above Mariette, as if suddenly interested. Turtledoves watch from the telephone wire. And Sister Hermance thinks, We will have a bounty. Everything she touches will grow. Dirt puts itself in her hands.

But just as you get lulled into the gentle narrative style, a carefully placed paragraph jolts you awake. These startling paragraphs which all take the same form — dialogue between a priest and a succession of various nuns — are never explained. It is only as you get deeper into the novel that you realise they are from an inhouse investigation into Mariette’s stigmata.

By juxtaposing these testimonies with the seemingly dull but very strictly ordered day-to-day existence of the sisters, Hansen is able to ratchet up the suspense and create a sense of mystery and intrigue where none would otherwise lay. This “device”, if you could call it such, kept me spellbound, and I raced through this novel in the space of a morning.

The blurb might describe Mariette in Ecstasy as one of the best novels to come out of 1991, but I’d argue that it’s one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading — and certainly the best one about nuns!