Reading

My reading group’s favourites for 2025

/ Whispering Gums / 12 Comments

Once again, I am sharing my reading group’s top picks for the year, because I think, like me, many of you enjoy hearing about other reading groups.

I’ll start by sharing what we read in the order we read them (with links on titles to my reviews):

Last year, I wrote that our schedule had been less diverse than it had been for a while, with eight of our eleven authors being Australian, seven of whom were Australian women. I’m always happy to support Australian women writers as you know, but diversity in a reading group is good. This year we did mix it up more. Only five of our eleven authors were Australian, four of whom were women. Of the other six, three were by American writers, and three by writers from Great Britain and Ireland. This could sound a little white-anglo focused but there was some diversity in our writers’ backgrounds, with an African American, First Nations American, and three Australians coming from migrant backgrounds (including Winnie Dunn, the first published Tongan Australian novelist). We read four male writers this year, versus two last year, but only one nonfiction work versus three last year. We didn’t read any novels in translation, which I’d love to rectify, and for the first time in a while we read no First Nations Australian work.

The top picks …

Like last year all eleven of our regularly attending members voted, meaning the maximum a book could get was 11 votes, and that there were 33 votes all up. The rules were the same. We had to name our three favourite works, and all were given equal weighting. Last year, the top three positions were closely fought with just a vote between each of the place-getters, but this year we had a runaway winner, and second place was ahead of the pack too, with two then tying for third place. (A bit more like 2023’s Top Picks).

2025’s top three places were:

  1. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (9 votes)
  2. Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me by Andra Putnis (7 votes)
  3. Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan and The night watchman by Louise Erdrich (4 votes each )

We didn’t name any highly commendeds because the rest of the votes were evenly spread across the rest of the books, with four receiving two votes, one receiving one, and two receiving no votes (not because, as we discussed at our Christmas do, they were disliked so much as they just didn’t jump out at people when it came to choosing three.) Some of the biggest Austen fans in the group didn’t vote for Mansfield Park (which received two votes) because, first, it was a multiple re-read for most of us and we decided to choose from new reads, and second, because it is in a league of its own.

As for my three picks, it was very tough (as always). I got something out of every book I read, and many will stay with me for a long time. There were five that I really wanted to nominate. Unlike last year, the group’s top pick was in my top three, but like last year, and like most years, my three books were all fiction. They were, in alphabetical order, Louise Erdrich’s The night watchman, Percival Everett’s James, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. I chose these because Strout took a flawed middle-aged woman and her community and described them with great humanity; because Erdrich captured an important story in First Nations American history and told it through characters who felt whole and real; and because Everett, with clever wit, used language in a way that shows the fundamental role it plays the power dynamic.

Selected comments

Not everyone included comments with their picks, and not all books received comments, but here’s a flavour of what was said:

Cover
  • Olive Kitteridge: Commenters talked about the humour and characterisation that made us come to like and understand a flawed protagonist; one described it beautifully saying “original voice, earthy characters, and quirky stories”.
  • Stories my grandmothers didn’t tell me: Commenters focused on its impact on their feelings, and its meaningful portrayal of the experiences of migration; one described it as “deeply personal [but] also universal”.
  • Caledonian Road: Four votes but only one comment which, however, summed it up perfectly, “loved the depth, breadth, Dickensian layers of multiple characters, and stories of modern London”.
  • The night watchman: The two commenters talked of its evocation of place and characters, and its depiction of a community coming together to oppose unfair laws that threaten to dispossess them more than they already were.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly if you were in a reading group this year. What did your group read and love?

Colum McCann, Twist (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 21 Comments

Colum McCann said during the conversation I attended back in May that books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. This is essentially reception theory, which, referencing Wikipedia, says that readers interpret the meaning of what they read based on their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. In other words, “the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader”.

Although I don’t adhere to any theory absolutely, this makes some sense to me – as does my extrapolation from this that the reader’s background and life experiences contribute not only to the meaning they obtain from a work, but their assessment of it.

Colum McCann’s latest novel Twist was my reading group’s last book of the year. All of us were fascinated by its underlying story about the data – our data – travelling around the world via undersea cables, and the fragility or vulnerability of this data. But, when it came to assessing how much we liked the book, other things came into play, things that say as much about who we are as readers, what we look for in books, as they say about the book itself. For example, readers who look to empathise with appealing, rounded, human characters might assess Twist quite differently from those for whom ideas play a significant role in their preferences.

I’ll return to this, but first more on the novel. Twist is narrated by 50-something Irish novelist, Anthony Fennell, whose career had stalled. It “felt stagnant”, and he was feeling disconnected from life, “the world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward”. He was, in fact, “unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore”. He needed, he tells us, “a story about connection, about grace, about repair”. Fortuitously, into his lap falls an assignment to write a long feature about a cable repair vessel, which is led by a man called John Conway (whose name, we soon realise, contains allusions to Joseph Conrad and also perhaps to that other well-known JC).

So, in the first few pages of the novel, we know we are being told a story from after the event by a writer who was there as it happened. We know this event relates to Conway because Fennell tells us on the opening page that something had happened to him, and that he is going to tell his version of what happened as best he can, which might take some “liberties with the gaps”. Conway, then, is central to the narrative arc, but we also know that the subject matter is data and the internet, and that the theme will concern ideas like connection and disconnection, brokenness and repair, fact, fiction and the limits of storytelling. It’s impressive, in fact, just how much of the rest of the book is set up in the first couple of pages.

The narrative proper then starts. It’s January 2019, and Fennell meets Conway, and his partner Zanele, in Cape Town, before joining the Georges Lacointe on its journey up the western African coast to the site of a cable break. It takes some time to get there, so we get to know Conway a bit more. He is a good leader, and his multicultural crew of men respect him. The first and main cable break is repaired at the end of Part One, and then things go seriously awry. Zanele, who was performing in her unauthorised climate-change-focused version of Waiting for Godot in rural England, suffers an acid attack. Life starts to “unravel” for Conway who cannot get away to help her. Indeed, as the back cover says, Conway disappears.

I will leave the plot there. It does get more complicated, so I’ve not spoiled it I believe. I will return instead to my opening point about readers and their assessments. Most of those in my group who had reservations focused on the characters. Conway and Zanele were too shadowy; they were not well-rounded; we didn’t know them well. And, why choose a hard-to-identify-with man like Fennell as a narrator? I understand these questions but they don’t concern me, because I read the book differently – so let’s look at that.

Twist draws from, or was inspired by, two classic novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, with its story of a man’s obsessive love for an unattainable woman, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and its story about the darkness at the centre of colonialism. While the narrative arc clearly owes much to Fitzgerald, McCann said during the aforementioned conversation that Conrad’s novel provides the more obvious literary parallel. Those tubes along the seabed, he said, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

“There is no logic. The world is messy.” (Fennell)

Looking at the novel through this perspective provides a way of understanding why McCann has written it the way he has. It is not about Conway and Zanele. We only see them through the eyes of Fennell. They are established enough to draw us in but their prime role is to support the ideas – disconnection, connection, turbulence, repair – rather than to be the subjects of the story. We know Fennell somewhat better, as we need to. He is a flawed man, stalled in life and feeling disconnected from it. It is his journey through the narrative that carries our hopes for repair.

If I had any criticism, it would more likely concern the writing. McCann’s is an exuberant, epigrammatic style. It’s not hard to see what he is doing, the games he is playing with meaning and metaphor. However, I can enjoy this sort of writing. It keeps ideas to the fore. And they were ideas that interest me – zeitgeist issues about the fragility of our data; the line between doubt/certainty, connection/disconnection (emotionally, spiritually, technologically), and break/repair; and the messiness of life. It’s not hard to find quotable quotes, like “opinion, the obscene certainty of our days” (p. 218) and “the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface” (p. 25). I enjoy these too!

Part Two opens with:

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.

By the end, McCann has told a story which illuminates the messiness of our time. The truth is that there is no real coherence. There is – and probably always has been – just all of us trying to muddle through the best way we can. This is not earth-shattering news, but McCann exposes some of the issues, many driven by technology, that affect our trying today. The light he throws on these – and the personal progress Fennell makes – are why I enjoyed reading this novel.

Colum McCann
Twist
London: Bloomsbury, 2025
239pp.
ISBN: 9781526656957

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 16 Comments

My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604

Brian Castro, Chinese postman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 14 Comments

Serendipity is a lovely word, and is even lovelier when it touches my reading. Such was the case with my last two books, Olga Tokarczuk’s House of day, house of night (my review) and Brian Castro’s Chinese postman. The connections between them are simple and complex. Both focus more on ideas than narrative, are disjointed in structure (or, at least, in reading experience), and draw consciously on their author’s lives. They also seem to be questioning the nature of fiction itself, a question that is true of two other books I’ve read in recent times – Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & practice (my review) and Sigrid Nunez’s The vulnerables (my review). None of these books are fast reads, but they are rewarding ones.

The other thing that connects these books is that, because narrative provides more of a loose structure than a driving force and because they blend that narrative with ruminations, memoir, essay, vignettes, anecdotes, recipes even, they exemplify the idea that every reader reads a different book. This is not only – or even primarily – because we are not all men in our mid-70s with mixed ethnicity, to take Castro (and his protagonist) as an example. Rather, it is because we all think about and weigh differently the issues and ideas these authors focus on.

In The vulnerables Nunez refers to Virginia Woolf (as does de Kretser) and her “aspiration to create a new form. The essay-novel”. She also refers to Annie Ernaux’s nonfiction book The years, describing it as “a kind of collective autobiography of her generation”. I’ve digressed a bit here, but my point is that these writers have things to say about their time, their generation, the state of the world – and they are looking for better ways to say it. They are suspicious of pure narrative, and yet I think they also recognise, to some degree at least, that “story” is a way to reach people. Therein lies the tension that each tries to deal with.

So now, Castro! There is a story, a sort of narrative, running through Chinese postman, and I’ll let publisher Giramondo explain it:

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls ‘the mannered and meditative inaction of age’, offering up memories and anxieties, obsessions and opinions, his thoughts on solitude, writing, friendship and time. He ranges widely, with curiosity and feeling, digressing and changing direction as suits his experience, and his role as a collector of fragments and a surveyor of ruins. He becomes increasingly engaged in an epistolary correspondence with Iryna Zarebina, a woman seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine…

The narrative arc, then, concerns this email correspondence with Iryna. It starts when she emails him:

Dear Professor, I am reading one of your books on the doorstep of war. You once wrote about war eloquently, so the critics said. I do not believe anyone can write eloquently about war. If you could find the time, could you please answer that question. (p. 29/30)

He doesn’t reply “of course”, because he suspects it’s a scam. But, the problem is, it’s got him thinking about his ‘”eloquence” in writing about war’. At this point, readers who have read the epigraphs will remember that one of them quotes John Hawkes*, who said, “Everything I have written comes out of nightmare, out of the nightmare of war”.

War – Ukraine, Vietnam, World War 2, and others – is, then, a constant presence in the novel. As is the aforementioned Iryna because, although she’s “probably a bearded scammer”, he does write back. He asks her about the “dogs in the Donbas”, hoping this “will shove aside the irritating accusation of eloquence”. And so a correspondence begins in which war and dogs, among other issues, are discussed. In other words, dogs become another thread in the novel, as do toilets, aging and its depredations, solitude, the writing life and more.

This is a “big” book, one that, as I’ve intimated, will be read differently by different people. Those concerned about where the world is heading will engage with the issues that mean something to them. Those of migrant background might most relate to his experience of discrimination and othering. Those of a certain age will relate to thoughts about mortality and managing the aging body. (To test or not to test is one question that arises.) Those of a literary bent will love the wordplay and clever, delightful allusions (and wonder how many more they missed. I loved, for example, the allusions to TS Eliot’s “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, a poem about anxiety and indecision which reflects Quin’s inner questioning about action and inaction. I also loved the wordplay that made me splutter at times.) And those interested in the form of the novel will wonder about where this is all leading!

“the unreliability of reason” (p. 232)

There is so much to write about this book, and I’m not sure I can capture the wonder of reading it, how ideas are looked at from every angle – inside out and upside down – in a way that illuminates and stimulates rather than confuses. It’s quite something.

I’ll try to explain something of this through two of the interweaving motifs – toilets and dogs. Both mean multiple things as Castro is not one to close things off. So, early on, toilets reflect the sort of cleaning work migrants must do to support themselves, as Abe does at University. Later, they are part of the aging person’s concern about bowel health. But, in between they could also symbolise feelings of disorder and helplessness, his “anxiety in the gut”, including just coping with “the difficult things of ordinary life”. Similarly dogs epitomise the instinctual, simple life, but, in stories like their being used for target practice, they could also represent innocent victims of war. Here of course, I’m sharing my personal responses to these motifs. There are many others.

No wonder Quin worries about the writing life. It’s something he, a writer, is driven to do, “it pushes fear into the background”, but does it achieve anything?

I’ve always believed it is the novel that carries all the indirect notes of empathy. It may even be violence that brings empathy to war and its suffering. It may be anything. Yet, the plasticity of the novel bends to all the obtuse emotions and accommodates them. Then all is confined to the scrapheap of having been read, having been experienced, having been second-hand and second-read. Major libraries are throwing out paper books. (p.140)

Chinese postman was my reading group’s September book, and it proved challenging, but that is a good thing. We had a lively discussion during which disagreement was not the flavour, but a genuine and engaged attempt to understand what Castro was on about. Whether we achieved that, who knows, but I am glad I have finally read Castro. I won’t be forgetting him soon.

* Wikipedia des John Hawkescribesa (1925-1998) as “a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction”. !

Brian Castro
Chinese postman
Artarmon: Giramondo, 2024
250pp.
ISBN: 9781923106130

Louise Erdrich, The night watchman (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 30 Comments

Louise Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prizewinning The night watchman is historical fiction about a community fighting back against a government set on “terminating them”. Erdrich, whom I have reviewed before, is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota and it is the story of this community’s response to something called the House Concurrent Resolution 108 that she tells in The night watchman.

Passed by Congress on August 1, 1953, this Resolution would, says Erdrich in her Afterword, “sever legal, sacred, and immutable promises made in nation-to-nation treaties”. Or, as Wikipedia explains, it would “end reservations and tribal sovereignty” and “integrate Native Americans into mainstream American society”.

As it happens, Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was Chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee at the time and recognised this resolution for what it was. He is the inspiration for Thomas Wazhushk, one of Erdrich’s two protagonists. Thomas is a man of two cultures:

Watching the night sky, he was Thomas who had learned about the stars in boarding school. He was also Wazhashk who had learned about the stars from his grandfather, the original Wazhashk. (p. 17)

Throughout the novel Thomas strategically draws on these two selves in order to perform his role, which is to keep the community safe (or, at least, safer, than they would be if the Government’s plans came to fruition).

This is both a sophisticated and a grounded novel. Grounded in the way Erdrich uses her storytelling ability to create a compelling narrative peopled by a large cast of wonderfully individuated characters. We are interested in them all, and this makes the novel a darned good read. Sophisticated in how Erdrich subtly layers her story to enrich its meaning. The overall structure comprises two parallel but related stories or journeys: Thomas’s fight for his community’s survival, and his niece Patrice’s journey to find both her missing sister and her own path in life. Erdrich’s writing is simple, plain, but also imbued with gorgeous lyricism, metaphor and symbolism. The novel is threaded, for example, with physical holes, wells, caves, ship holds, and falls, which never let us forget the precariousness of these people’s lives.

She also peppers the story with humour, which reminds us no matter how serious things are, people can still have a laugh. There are many laugh-out-loud moments, alongside a recognition of humour’s role in how we navigate the things we confront. In Minneapolis, Patrice finds herself in a strange and potentially dangerous situation, and has

the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt… (p. 131)

“Survival is a changing game” (Biboon)

Overlaying all this is Erdrich’s exploration of how language works, how it can be used to clarify or obfuscate, to inspire or deflate. Her writing embodies this knowledge. So, for example, Thomas receives the Resolution papers and reads them carefully. He sees

their unbelievable intent. Unbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians … his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here. (p. 79)

His people were being targeted, the papers said,

for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipation. This word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians* was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’s father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. (p. 80)

Later, the once dapper but now frequently drunk Eddy Mink cuts to the chase, stunning officialdom with his plain language statement:

The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States. (p. 200)

Meanwhile, as Thomas builds his case, Patrice, who works in the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant where Thomas is the titular night watchman, sets off for Minneapolis to look for her sister. Vera had gone there with her new husband but had not been heard of since. What Patrice finds in the city, how people can be exploited, is shocking, and she returns home somewhat wiser but with more to learn about herself and the ways of humans.

Surrounding Thomas and Patrice is a large community of people – family, friends, neighbours, work colleagues, teachers, coaches, visiting missionaries, and even a ghost. The interactions between these people build up a picture of a community that functions despite external stresses and the usual internal disagreements. This makes engrossing reading because these characters are so real, including the two Mormon missionaries who not only add humour and pathos but also represent the naiveté of supporters of a faith – in the form of Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins – that was driving the Resolution.

Similarly, our protagonists’ interactions with specific individuals make great reading while also advancing the narrative and the ideas. When Thomas is with his father Biboon and Patrice with her mother Zhaanat, we feel their spiritual connection with their culture, and their desire to learn from their elders. When Thomas is with the white teacher and boxing coach, Barnes, we see how little non-Indian society understands the existing situation and the implications of the Resolution. Thomas patiently – and generously – explains to the clueless Barnes why Indians are not, and can never be, “regular Americans”. And, why he, Barnes, cannot be an Indian! Just look at this writing:

“If I married an Indian woman,” said Barnes, “would that make me an Indian? Could I join the tribe?”
He was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making.
Thomas looked at the big childish man with his vigorous corn-yellow cowlicks and watery blue eyes. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for a white fellow. There was something about some of them—their sudden thought that to become an Indian might help. Help with what? Thomas wanted to be generous. But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.
“No,” he said gently, “you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.”

In statements like “he was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making”, Erdrich conveys more about cultural superiority than just this man’s thoughts.

When Patrice is with her girlfriends and workmates, Valentine and Doris, we see how her goals diverge from their more girlish ones, and when she is with Wood Mountain we see her inner conflict about her chosen direction. As a young person, her journey is more personal than Thomas’s but they coalesce when it comes to saving the community.

“Assimilation. Their ways become your ways.” (Roderick)

I loved spending time with these characters. In fact, so did most of my reading group, as this novel was our September read. We enjoyed her vividly drawn characters – and their perfect names, like Juggie Blue, Wood Mountain, Louis Pipestone, Millie Cloud, and Patrice not Pixie. We teased out the complexity of the storytelling, the way Erdrich seemed to effortlessly incorporate complex ideas into a compelling narrative. This starts right at the title, The nightwatchman, which is both literal, Thomas’ job, and metaphorical, in his role of keeping watch as the community’s Chairman. I was reminded a little of Melissa Lucashenko’s novels, in which tough stories are told with compassion and humour to paint a picture of real people confronting a world that’s against them.

Early in the novel, Thomas moves that the Committee call the Resolution the “Termination Bill [because] Those words like emancipation and freedom are smoke”. This bill heralded what is now called the Termination Era (1953-1968). As Erdrich explains in her Afterword, this is what happened to 113 tribal nations. Although some regained recognition, “31 are now landless” and “24 are considered extinct” (p. 447).

The night watchman is one of those books that hits the spot – the heart spot and the mind spot. Recommended.

* The novel is set in 1953, and Indian is the term most commonly used when the specific Chippewa is not.

Louise Erdrich
The night watchman
London: Corsair, 2020
453pp. (Kindle edition.)
ISBN: 9781472155337

Winnie Dunn, Dirt poor Islanders (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 23 Comments
Book cover

When my reading group chose our books for the second half of the year, the shortlist for the Miles Franklin Award had not yet been announced. However, wonderfully, the three books we chose from the longlist, all ended up on the shortlist. One of those was Winnie Dunn’s debut novel, Dirt poor Islanders. It is the first novel published by a Tongan Australian, and adds a welcome strand to the body of Australia’s second and third generation migrant literature.

Dirt poor Islanders spans around a year when its protagonist Meadow is approaching 12 years old. It can, therefore, also be read as a coming-of-age novel. It is a raw, earthy, honest and sometimes confronting read that exposes the challenges faced by Australian-born migrant generations, who are caught between two worlds.

This is not a new story. However, what is impressive here is that Dunn, in her first novel, has found her own strong and clear voice. It’s there in the way she gets right into the head of her protagonist Meadow, who is, admittedly, modelled on herself. It’s there in the way she interweaves English and Tongan language, capturing the vitality in her migrant community. It’s also there in her use of repetition, some of it onomatopoeic, to give her writing rhythm and create a tone that’s sometimes melancholic, sometimes humorous. Dunn also doesn’t spoon-feed her readers. She expects us to go with the flow and make the necessary connections. It’s not hard reading, but it does require attention.

“this way of seeing myself as half … and never enough” (Meadow)

So, who is Meadow? She’s a young girl who lost her birth mother at the age of 4. At the novel’s opening she is the eldest of six children in a blended family comprising three children from her birth mother, one from her step-mother, and two from this second marriage. Another is on the way. Her father is 30 years old. Meadow is grappling with what it means to grow up Tongan, particularly one who is hafekasi (half-Tongan half-White) and feeling caught between two worlds, neither of which fully accept her. She is desperate for a mother, and feels closest to her namesake, aunt Meadow, who lives in Mount Druitt with our Meadow’s paternal grandmother and another four aunts.

We follow Meadow through a tumultuous year. Early on, she spends most weekends at her Nana’s house surrounded by the five aunts, but when her father buys a new house in Plumpton, he wants Meadow, her sister Nettie and brother Jared, to call that home. With her birth mother gone, however, Meadow feels “stuck” and insecure. Aunt Meadow, also known as Lahi, is her “mother-aunt” and her rock. The narrative is built around the wedding of this Lahi, who, Meadow believes, is more interested in women. She fears for her boyish aunt, but she also fears for herself, that she will lose this mother figure to whom she clings with all her being.

Now, Meadow wants to be a writer, so she’s an observant girl, well able to express her feelings. She sees the messiness – literal and figurative – of Tongan lives, and she shares the lessons she is learning about being Tongan, not all of which are pretty. For example, “Tongan meant dirty” (p. 37), “being a joke” (p. 73) and “second best” (p. 102). But, there are positives too. “Togetherness was what it meant to be Tongan” (p. 40) and “being Tongan meant eating together and being grateful to eat together” (p. 118).

Dirt poor Islanders, then, depicts a migrant family living under stress. Big families and low-paying jobs with long hours mean a chaotic home. Meadow’s scalp is nit-infested, and her home, decorated with second-hand goods, much picked off roadsides, is cockroach-infested. Her parents work hard to keep the family sheltered and fed, but the mess overwhelms. Flipping between maturity and immaturity, Meadow sees all this – the hard work, the exhaustion, the love – but she struggles to find her place, to accept her Tongan heritage.

It all finally comes to a head, and her father organises for her to go to Tonga, because, he says, “it’s time for youse to know what being a Tongan truly means” (p. 239).

Migrant literature encompasses both memoir and fiction, with the latter mostly being autobiographical or autofiction. Dunn confirmed in her Conversations interview that much of the novel’s family background comes from her life, but the novel diverges from real life in its narrative arc and the resolution of Meadow’s inner turmoil. This answered the question I had as I was reading, which was why Dunn had chosen fiction, like Melina Marchetta did in Looking for Alibrandi, over memoir, like Alice Pung did in Unpolished gem. It’s a choice. What matters are the truths conveyed, not the facts, and Dirt poor Islanders feels truthful.

This truth is not all raw and confronting as I may have implied at the beginning. It is also warm and humorous. Meadow, who doesn’t like rich, fatty Tongan food tells us:

If it came out of a can covered in sugar and sodium, Tongans were eating it. But back then, all I wanted was food that came out of a window. (p. 37)

Preferably at Maccas! There are also funny scenes, many relating to the wedding which occupies the novel’s centre, and which is another nod – besides the title and epigraph – to the book that clearly inspired Dunn, Kevin Kwan’s Crazy rich Asians.

“no one could live as half of themselves” (Meadow)

However, Dunn’s book is fundamentally different from Kwan’s, whose aim, he said, was, to “introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience”. Dunn did want to introduce Tongan Australian culture – and counteract the image presented by Chris Lilley in Summer Heights High – but through Meadow, she also explores the excruciating difficulties children caught between cultures face. By the end of the novel Meadow comes to understand a little more the “messy truth” of being an Islander, and that:

No one could live as half of themselves. To live, I needed to embrace Brown, pālangi, noble, peasant, Tonga, Australia – Islander. (p. 275)

Dirt poor Islanders is both shocking and exciting to read, which is probably just what Dunn intended. I feel richer for it!

Winnie Dunn
Dirt poor Islanders
Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2024
293pp.
ISBN: 9780733649264

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 46 Comments

Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge has been around for 17 years, but it’s only now that I have managed to read it. And that’s because my reading group scheduled it as our June read. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it – I really did – but other books kept getting in the way. I realise now that I should not have let that happen because Olive Kitteridge is a wonderful read.

Now, how to describe it? The first thing is its form. It’s more like a collection of linked stories, or what its Wikipedia article calls a short story cycle. Although I’ve read many linked short story collections, I haven’t come across this term before. I’d like to explore it some time, but not now, because I’m keen to talk about the book. I will say, though, that some in my reading group found the episodic form somewhat disconcerting at first. However, despite this, almost all of us thoroughly enjoyed the book. Why? Well, as it turned out, the form is partly what makes it such a strong and moving read.

As most of you will know, the novel is set mostly in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries in the fictional small-town of Crosby, in coastal Maine. It comprises 13 chapters – or stories – that explore the life of retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge and her relationships with family and friends. In some of the chapters Olive is front and centre, but in others she makes a cameo appearance, sometimes just as a passing reference. The end result is as much a picture of a small town as it is of Olive, though Olive is our lynchpin. As one of my reading group members said, her question as she read each story was, “Where’s Olive?”

everyone thinks they know everything and no one knows a damn thing. (“River”)

So, while my reading group talked about the form and the gorgeous writing, we mostly focused on the picture painted of a small town – which, said one, provides an antidote to the “apple-pie” image we typically get of small-town America – and on the character of Olive. She is complex and not easy for readers to like, but we found her real, and most of us did like her. The opening story, “Pharmacy”, doesn’t pull any punches in its depiction of Olive. She comes across as curmudgeonly, uncompromising. She is cutting about her husband Henry’s new young pharmacy assistant and unwilling empathise with her. She is prickly and vengeful with her son’s new bride, Suzanne (“A Little Burst”), while Bob in “Winter Concert” wonders how Henry can “stand” her.

However, there are many occasions where Olive is kind and compassionate, where she sees need in others and helps or offers to help, where, as Henry describes it, “all her outer Olive-ness” is stripped away. For example, ex-student Julie remembers Olive telling a class

“Don’t be scared of your hunger. If you’re scared of your hunger, you’ll just be one more ninny like everyone else.” (“Ship in a bottle”)

And Rebecca recollects Olive saying to her at school, “if you ever want to talk to me about anything you can” (“Criminal”). Olive also quietly talks a young man, an ex-student, down from suicide (“Incoming tide”) and she and the truly “nice” Daisy try hard to help the young anorexic Nina (“Starving”).

Olive, too, can be insightful. In “Security”, for example, we read that sometimes she had “a sense of just how desperately hard everyone in the world was working to get what they needed”. And she suffers, especially from a “rupture” with her beloved son, and from grief over husband Henry’s massive stroke.

So, what we have is a character who can be tough and acerbic – even engage in a little schadenfreude – but also be sensitive and empathetic. This led me to see the book as being about more than a picture of a small town, much as that is a central and engaging part of it. The form – the interconnected short stories about life in the town – supports this view of the novel. However, this form also supports another way of looking at it, one encompassing something fundamental about our humanity.

In each story, we see characters confronting some crisis or challenge in their lives – some big ones, some quieter ones. We never see these stories fully through. They are vignettes, even those featuring Olive. This made me think about how little we know others, and perhaps even ourselves? We never fully know what others think of us, or what impact we have on others, but in this book – largely because of its form – we do see, for example, how Olive is, or has been, viewed or remembered, both positively and negatively. No one perspective is right, but each contributes to a picture of a person. This is how life goes. We see little parts of people’s lives, and sometimes we are little or big parts of people’s lives, but what do we truly know?

A bleak interpretation of this could be that it exposes our essential aloneness, but a more positive perspective is that it reminds us that we are all “real” people with good and bad, hard and soft selves. Books like Olive Kitteridge encourage us to look around corners, to not take one aspect of a person at face value, to be generous to others and ourselves. It also reminds us that we never stop learning about ourselves (or others). Certainly, at the end of this book, Olive, in her early 70s, is still discovering things about herself and her feelings. She isn’t giving up, no matter how tough things have become.

In my group’s opening discussion, I said that I thought the novel offered many truths, albeit often uncomfortable ones. For example, in “Tulips”, which is a story about things going terribly wrong, Olive reflects, “There was no understanding any of it”. But, my favourite occurs in “Security”, when some rapprochement is being made with her son, and Olive thinks

whatever rupture had occurred… It could be healed. It would be leaving its scars but one accumulated these scars.

One surely does!

There’s so much more to talk about in this book – the spot-on descriptions, the quiet humour, the many beautifully wrought characters and their trials, and the political references such as to 9/11 and George W Bush which provide context. But the main story is the human, the personal. The novel closes with Olive reflecting deeply on her life and her choices, on how much had been “unconsciously squandered”. She realises that, while

It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

I love getting inside the heads of characters like Olive, and so I loved Olive Kitteridge. I’ll be reading more Strout I’m sure.

Brona and Kate both read and enjoyed this long before I did!

Elizabeth Strout
Olive Kitteridge
London: Simon & Schuster, 2008
270pp.
ISBN: 9781849831550

Percival Everett, James (#BookReview)

/ Whispering Gums / 32 Comments

Well, let’s see how I go with this post on Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel James. I read all but 30 pages of this novel before my reading group’s meeting on 27 May. I was not at the meeting as I was in Far North Queensland, but I wanted to send in some notes, which I did. The next day, our tour proper started and I did not read one page of any novel from then until the tour ended. So, it was some 15 days later before I was able to pick it up to finish it. I found it surprisingly easy to pick up and continue on but, whether it will be easy to remember all my thoughts to write about it, is another thing. However, I’ll give it a go.

I greatly enjoyed the read. The facts of slavery depicted here are not new, but Everett offers a clever, engaging and witty perspective through which to think about it, while also being serious and moving. In terms of form, it’s a genre-bender that combines historical and adventure fiction, but I would say these are overlaid with the road novel, a picaresque or journey narrative, those ones about freedom, escape and survival rather than adventure.

Now, I’m always nervous about reading books that rewrite or riff on other books, particularly if I’ve not read the book or not read it recently. I’m not even sure which is true for Huckleberry Finn, given I came across that book SO long ago. Did I read it all in my youth? I’m not sure I did, but I don’t think it mattered here, because the perspective is Jim’s, not Huck’s. More interesting to me is the fact that at times James reminded me of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, such as when James says “we are slaves. What really can be worse in this world” (pt 2, ch 1) and his comment on the death of an escaping slave, “she’s just now died again, but this time she died free” (pt 2 ch 6).

Before I say more, however, I should give a brief synopsis. It is set in 1861 around the Mississippi River. When the titular slave, James, hears he is about to be sold to a new owner some distance away and be separated from his wife and daughter, he goes into hiding to give himself time to work out what to do. At the same time, the young Huck Finn fakes his own death to escape his violent father, and finds himself in the same hiding place as James. They set off down the river on a raft, without a firm plan in mind. The journey changes as events confront them, and as they hear news of a war coming that might change things for slaves. Along the way they meet various people, ranging from the cruel and brutal through the kind and helpful to the downright brave. They face challenges, of course, and revelations are shared. The ending is satisfying without being simplistic.

“It always pays to give white folks what they want” (James)

All this makes for a good story, but what lifts it into something more is the character and first-person voice of James. Most of you will know by now that Everett portrays James as speaking in educated English amongst his own people but in “slave diction” to white people and strangers. On occasion, he slips up which can result in white people not understanding him (seriously!) or being confused, if not shocked, that a black man can not only speak educated English but can read and write. Given the role language plays as a signifier of class and culture, it’s an inspired trope that exemplifies the way slavery demeans, humiliates and brutalises human beings.

James – the book and the character – has much to say about human beings. There’s a wisdom here about human nature. Not all slaves, for example, see things the same way. Some are comfortable in their situation (or, at least, fear change), while some will betray others to ingratiate (or save) themselves. But others recognise that there is no life without freedom and will put themselves on the line to save another. We meet all of these in the novel. And, of course, we meet white people of various ilks too. Some of the most telling parts of the novel are James’ insights into the assumptions, values and attitudes of white people and into how slaves, and presumably coloured people still today, work around these. It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious:

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them … The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior’ …” (pt 1 ch 2)

AND

It always made life easier when white folks could laugh at a poor slave now and again. (pt 1 ch 12)

Everett piles irony upon irony, daring us to go with him, such as when James is “hired” (or is he “bought”, he’s not quite sure) to perform with some black-and-white minstrels, and has to be “painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black”:

Never had a situation felt so absurd, surreal and ridiculous. And I had spent my life as a slave. (pt 1 ch 30)

There are other “adventures” along the way of course – including one involving a religious revival meeting. James is not too fond of religion, differentiating him, perhaps, from many of his peers.

Is James typical of slaves of the time? I’m not sure he is, but I don’t think that’s the point. This is not a realist novel but a novel intending to convey the reality of slavery and what it did to people. James jolts us into seeing a slave’s story with different eyes. We are forced to see his humanity – and perhaps the joke is on “us” white people. Making him sound like “us” forces us to see him as “us”. We cannot pretend he is other or different. This is seriously, subversively witty, I think.

And this brings me to my concluding point which is that the novel interrogates the idea of what is a “good” white person. No matter how “good” or “decent” we are, we cannot escape the fact that we are white and privileged. No matter what we say or do, how empathetic we try to be, it doesn’t change the fundamental issue. James makes this point several times, such as “there were those slaves who claimed a distinction between good masters and cruel masters. Most of us considered such to be a distinction without difference” (pt 1 ch 15). I suppose this is “white guilt”, but I don’t really know how to resolve it. Talking about it feels like virtue signalling, but not talking about it feels like a denial of the truth. There were times when the book felt a little anachronistic, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me because historical fiction is, fundamentally, the past viewed through modern eyes. And how are we really to know how people felt back then?

I’d love to know what you think if you’ve read the novel (as for example Brona has!) 

Percival Everett
James
London: Mantle, 2024
303pp.
ISBN: 9781035031245

    Jane Austen, Emma (Vol. 2, redux 2025)

    / Whispering Gums / 12 Comments
    EmmaCovers

    In April, I wrote a post on Volume 1 of Emma, sharing the thoughts that had come to me during my Jane Austen’s group’s current slow read of the novel. This month, I’m sharing some ideas that Volume 2 raised for me.

    I wrote in my Volume 1 post that, during this read, what popped out for me was the idea of young people lacking guidance. It relates to issues like character development and to themes like parenting (which Austen regularly explores in her novels.) The question with these slow reads always is, will an idea that pops up in one Volume continue in the next? Well, in this case my answer is yes and no.

    Jane Austen, Emma, Penguin

    What I mean by this is that this notion expanded for me in Volume 2 to encompass the idea of “nature versus nurture”. Now, I’m not saying that Austen was specifically engaging in that debate, but that she has a lot to say about both aspects of our character. Before I continue, I will just share that I did wonder when the “nature versus nurture” debate started?

    My searches, including via Wikipedia and two AI services, revealed that while ideas about innate (nature) vs. learned traits (nurture) can be traced back to ancient philosophy, the “nature versus nurture” debate, as a formal concept, began in the mid-1800s with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the term in his 1874 publication, “English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture”. In case you are interested, Chat GPT advised that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle debated discussed the role of “heredity and environment in shaping individuals” with Plato leaning towards nature (“innate knowledge”) and Aristotle towards nurture (“experience and environment”). And Wikipedia identifies Chen Seng having asked a similar question in 209 BCE. These aren’t the only people to have thought about the question, and Wikipedia’s article is useful if you are interested. But I’ll move on as the history of the debate is not my focus here.

    What kept popping up for me – as I looked to see how my guidance-of-young-people theme was developing – were various comments Austen was making about nature and nurture. I’ll share just a few.

    The first one to come to my attention in Volume 2, concerned Jane Fairfax, who was orphaned as a toddler and brought up, at first, by her grandmother, Mrs Bates, and aunt, Miss Bates. Austen describes her as a three-year-old

    “her being taught only what very limited means could command, and growing up with no advantages of connection or improvement to be engrafted on what nature had given her in a pleasing person, good understanding, and warm-hearted, well-meaning relations.” 

    So, “nature had given her” a good start, and her relations had nurtured her as best they could with their “very limited means”. However, soon after, the Campbells (the family of a friend) had taken her in:

    “She had fallen into good hands, known nothing but kindness from the Campbells, and been given an excellent education. Living constantly with right-minded and well-informed people, her heart and understanding had received every advantage of discipline and culture”.

    And then, Austen seems to make the point that Jane Fairfax’s innate character, her disposition, was such that good nurturing had found fertile opportunity: “Her disposition and abilities were equally worthy of all that friendship could do…” Unfortunately, with no money, her destiny looked likely to be governessing, which the Campbells knew and did their best to prepare her for, but that’s another story …

    As for Frank Churchill, in my last post regarding guidance, I noted that Austen suggests that, with his guardian family (his aunt and uncle at Enscombe), he had been left to his own devices with little guidance other than “his own comfort”. In this volume, Austen says more about his nature

    “He seemed to have all the life and spirit, cheerful feelings, and social inclinations of his father, and nothing of the pride or reserve of Enscombe.”

    It seems that at least some of the Churchills’ nature had not been nurtured into Frank. Ironically, it’s Emma’s father, Mr Woodhouse, who identifies some flaws in his behaviour, calling him “not quite the thing”, though his reasons are fussy.

    And then there’s the third character whom we meet in Volume 2, Mrs Elton. These are Emma’s thoughts, and she is a snob, but nonetheless, she hones in on some points relevant to my thinking:

    and the quarter of an hour quite convinced her that Mrs. Elton was a vain woman, extremely well satisfied with herself, and thinking much of her own importance; that she meant to shine and be very superior, but with manners which had been formed in a bad school, pert and familiar; that all her notions were drawn from one set of people, and one style of living; that, if not foolish, she was ignorant, and that her society would certainly do Mr. Elton no good.

    We don’t know how much of this comes from Mrs Elton’s nature, but Emma does lay a much blame for her behaviour and character on her nurture.

    Then there’s sweet Harriet, whom we met in Volume 1, and whom Emma considered, then, “not clever, but she had a sweet, docile, grateful disposition” and only needed to be “guided by any one she looked up to”. In Volume 2, her nature is again referenced, in terms of “the many vacancies of Harriet’s mind”! Poor Harriet. What will happen to her? Wait for Volume 3!

    Finally, it’s Emma’s brother-in-law Mr John Knightley, who shows particular sense, when he provides these instructions to Emma on caring for his sons while he’s away:

    ” .. Do not spoil them, and do not physic* them.” 
    “I rather hope to satisfy you both,” said Emma; “for I shall do all in my power to make them happy, which will be enough for Isabella; and happiness must preclude false indulgence and physic.”

    [* Meaning, don’t medicate them as their mother, Emma’s sister, is wont to do.]

    There’s no reference here to specific moral, or any other education, but we can infer from this, and our knowledge of the man, that he is well aware of the importance of good nurturing to his sons.

    Of course, there were other issues that intrigued me in Volume 2, but these ideas are the ones I want to document this go round with Emma.

    Any thoughts?

    Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Vol. 3)

    / Whispering Gums / 26 Comments
    Mansfield Park book covers
    Mansfield Park book covers

    A year ago, my Jane Austen group did a slow read of Mansfield Park, meaning we read and discussed it, one volume at a time, over three months. I posted my thoughts on volume 1 (chapters 1 to 30), and volume 2 (chapters 19 to 31), but I missed the third meeting, and never wrote up the final volume (chapters 32 to 48). However, this year my reading group scheduled Mansfield Park for our Classic read, so I’m taking the opportunity to share my thoughts on that last volume.

    But first, a brief intro. The reading group member who recommended we read Mansfield Park did so because she wanted to see whether she would better like this, her least favourite Austen, on another read. She didn’t. I understand this. Mansfield Park is regularly identified as Austen’s hardest book to like. It feels prudish to modern eyes; its protagonist Fanny isn’t exciting nor is her romance; and it is more serious and certainly less sparkling than its predecessor, Pride and prejudice. Re this latter point, Jane Austen collected opinions on the novel from friends, family and others, and reported that one Mrs Bramstone “preferred it to either of the others — but imagined that might be her want of Taste — as she does not understand Wit.”

    Now, my thoughts …

    Volume 3 starts the day after Fanny has rejected Henry Crawford’s proposal. As someone in my reading group said, all the novel’s action takes place in the final chapters, and I mostly agree, although significant events do take place in the previous volumes, including the visit to Sotherton and the plan to put on the play, Lovers vows.

    I wrote in my first two posts that what was striking me most was the selfishness, or self-centredness, of most of the characters. It suggested to me that Austen was critiquing the selfishness/self-centredness of the well-to-do, and how this results in poor behaviour, carelessness of the needs of others, and for some, in immoral behaviour. (I think we could equate these ideas with today’s concerns about “entitlement”.) This thread continued in volume 3. Indeed, here is where it all comes home to roost, confirming my sense that Mansfield Park is fundamentally about morality.

    Fanny is clearly the novel’s moral centre. She quietly observes, and reflects on, what goes on around her. As one of my reading group members said, it is through her eyes, her thoughts, that we see the novel’s world. In the first chapter of volume 3, Sir Thomas speaks to Fanny about Henry’s proposal, explaining why she should accept him. Henry is

    a young man … with everything to recommend him: not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to everybody.

    Then he adds pressure. She owes Henry gratitude for his role in obtaining advancement for her brother in the navy, and marrying Henry is her duty to her family as such a marriage can only help them. Sir Thomas is therefore perplexed and shocked at Fanny’s ongoing refusal – despite these persuasions – to consider Henry. He asks:

    “Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Mr. Crawford’s temper?”
    “No, sir.”
    She longed to add, “But of his principles I have” …

    However, she feels that to tell Sir Thomas of her observations of Henry’s unprincipled behaviour towards Julia and the engaged Maria would betray them – so, she’s caught and says nothing. She hoped Sir Thomas – “so discerning, so honourable, so good” – would accept her “dislike” as sufficient reason. Unfortunately, not only can he not accept it, but he accuses her of wilfulness and ingratitude. It’s mortifying.

    To his credit, however, Sir Thomas backs off, planning to let nature take its course, and, with a little judicious encouragement from the sidelines, he believes Henry will win her round. So Henry continues to press his suit, and Fanny continues to hold steady, reflecting at one point on “his want of delicacy and regard for others”. A few chapters on, Mary Crawford also presses her brother’s suit, but Fanny – she who is called wimpy by many modern readers – pushes back, telling Mary,

    I had not, Miss Crawford, been an inattentive observer of what was passing between him and some part of this family in the summer and autumn. I was quiet, but I was not blind. I could not but see that Mr. Crawford amused himself in gallantries which did mean nothing.

    While Fanny is coping with this, Edmund is moving forward with his plans to win Mary Crawford’s hand, despite her rather telling hatred of his chosen profession as a clergyman. Fanny – not altogether disinterested it has to be admitted – had observed Mary’s poor values, but it takes Edmund a long time to see her for what she is, for her lack of “principle”, her “blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind”. Edmund is convinced that Mary had been corrupted by the influence of others. He talks of “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier” (instead of those poor influences she had in London. City versus country values is another thread running through this novel.)

    I could expand more on this selfishness-leading-to-poor-behaviour-or-immorality theme because examples abound in the volume, but my aim here is to just share some ideas. And, I want to share another one…

    I also mentioned another developing theme in my post on volume 1, the education of Sir Thomas. Interestingly, this is related to something I am observing in my current slow read of Austen’s next novel Emma, that of the quality of guidance given to young people and what happens when that guidance is faulty, misguided and/or not grounded in good moral teaching. It’s not a new theme for Austen, as you can see in Edmund’s comments above about Mary Crawford. But, it’s Sir Thomas’s learnings as one of those who does the guiding that I want to focus on.

    Like many of Austen’s characters, in fact, Sir Thomas engenders a variety of reactions from readers. Some see him as harsh and uncompromising. It’s easy to argue this when you see the way his children – and niece – fear him. But others, and I am one, see him as a father trying to bring up his children as best he can, with little help from the indolent Lady Bertram. Fanny, our moral centre, talks of his “parental solicitude”. We see hints of his kindness in volumes 1 and 2, but it is in volume 3 that we see what he is really made of. He’s a man of his times, of course, but one who had his children’s best interests at heart and who realised too late that his raising of them had been misguided.

    Now, before I continue, I want to make a little comment about style and structure. For most of the book, though there are departures, we are in Fanny’s head, seeing what she sees, thinking what she thinks, but in the book’s final chapter, Austen breaks the fourth wall and talks to us directly. It opens with a favourite quote:

    Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

    “I quit”, she says, drawing attention to the fact that she is telling us a story, and she continues this way:

    My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything…

    The rest of the chapter wraps up the novel and her characters. She devotes a few pages to “poor Sir Thomas”, telling us that he “was the longest to suffer” due to “the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters”. He reflected on the negative impact on Maria and Julia of the “totally opposite treatment” they had lived under

    where the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own severity. […]

    Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.

    Just look at those last few sentences … there, I think, is Austen’s driver for this novel. Maria and Julia had been allowed to focus on “elegance and accomplishments” with no attention paid to “the moral effect on the mind”. Mary Crawford is similarly misguided.

    Jane Austen, as we know, could be witty and acerbic with the best of them, but in this most serious novel of hers she may have shared the moral and social values dearest to her heart.

    Thoughts?