Ruth Reichl, Not becoming my mother

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Ruth Reichl, Not becoming my mother
Book cover (Courtesy: Allen& Unwin)

Ruth Reichl and Kate Jennings were both born in 1948, the former in the USA and the latter in Australia. Both had problematic relationships with their mothers and have written about those relationships, Reichl in memoirs and Jennings in her autobiographical novel, Snake. In her first memoir, Tender at the bone (1998), Reichl tells a few (many of them funny) stories against her mother, and describes her urgent need to escape home. Some 20 years later in Not becoming my mother, she revisits her mother – but with the wisdom that time brings. Similarly, in Snake, Jennings’ major focus is “Girlie” and her mother, and particularly Girlie’s desperation to be loved by a woman who was fundamentally unhappy and unable to provide that love.

The thing is that these mothers* were born in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. They experienced war, depression and, worse still, the awful restrictions imposed on women of that era. Not only were education and work not encouraged, but they were told that marriage was the only life for them. This is the story Reichl tells in Not becoming my mother, and in doing so explores who her mother really was and finally recognises (and appreciates) why her mother behaved the way she did. Here she is on her mother and her mother’s friends:

I have never seen so many unhappy people. They were smart, they were educated and they were bored. Some of them did charitable work, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Their misery was an ugly thing, and it was hard on their families. It was a terrible waste of talent and energy, and watching them I knew that I was never going to be like them.

The mother in Jennings’ novel tells her daughter:

‘She’ll be married at eighteen, a hag by the time she’s thirty’, continues Irene. ‘Don’t let it happen to you’.

Ruth’s mother, on hearing of Ruth’s engagement:

‘Isn’t this very old-fashioned?’ she asked, coolly … ‘I thought that these days people your age just lived together.’

I was certain that Mom would eventually warm to the idea. She did not …

She had introduced me to her friends, shown me the drawbacks of a traditional marriage and offered me what she herself had wanted – permission not to marry.

Both mothers – Ruth’s real one and Kate’s (semi)fictional one – seek meaningful things to do with their lives and to them this primarily meant (preferably paid) work. Both manage it in fits and starts but society was not enamoured of working women and did not make it easy for them. Both mothers experienced some degree of mental illness – which reflects that well documented fact that married women were (and still are, I believe) the highest risk group for mental illness.

These are not pretty stories but they need to be told. Interestingly, Reichl’s story has a positive ending. Late in her life, her mother does find meaning and spends her last years actively involved in her community. Jennings’ fictional story, on the other hand, ends far more equivocally. Despite these differences, both books are powerful reminders of what life was like for a whole generation of women. And they remind us why we need to keep working to ensure self-actualisation for everyone, regardless of gender or other socially imposed limitations.

By the time she wrote Not becoming my mother, Reichl had made her peace with her mother’s memory, had finally realised that much of her mother’s seemingly bizarre or erratic behaviour was borne of the frustration in her life and her desire that her daughter not follow her footsteps. Luckily for me, my mother, also born in the first third of the century, managed to convey similar messages about education, work and marriage, while also providing the love and support that all children need and deserve.

Ruth Reichl
Not becoming my mother, and other things she taught me along the way
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009
112pp
ISBN: 9781741757538

* These are just two examples of sad, difficult mothers from those decades. There are many more, such as Jill Ker Conway‘s mother in The road from Coorain.

Anna Krien, Into the woods

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How can so many people all be looking at the same thing and see it so differently? The man moseying around in front of me looks at a 300-year old tree and sees a nursing home, while an activist twenty minutes down the road sees a block of flats for furry and feathered creatures.

Vive la différence? Or not! Anna Krien’s Into the woods is an exposé of the decades long battle in Tasmania for its forests, particularly its old-growth native forests. For those who don’t know, Tasmania is Australia’s southern island state. It is famous for its beauty and its wilderness but also, it seems, for its Vs, that is, vitriol, violence and vigilantism. You see, being a small island state, with only 500,000 people, it’s a challenge to keep its economy in the black. Sawmilling and, more recently and more controversially, woodchipping have played an important role in maintaining its economy. It is this controversy – particularly surrounding woodchips – that Krien explores in her book.

Anna Krien, Into the woods

Cover image (Courtesy: Black Inc

On the cover is a “blurb” by Chloe Hooper who wrote The tall man about the death in custody of an indigenous man on Palm Island. This provides a clue to the book’s style, and that is that the author, like Hooper, engages personally in the situation, meeting with parties on all sides of the conflict. In Krien’s case this meant meeting ferals, environmentalists, politicians, loggers, whistleblowers, craftsmen and businessmen.

Krien has organised the book into five thematic sections:

  • Ratbags: the new generation protesters, or ferals, who live pretty primitively on/near the site  they are protecting and who are often in conflict with older activists
  • Loggers: the logging industry workers who range across a wide range of jobs in the industry and are also often conflict with each other
  • The company: Gunns Ltd, the main player in the Tasmanian logging industry, meddler (if so benign a term can be used) in politics, and initiator of the Gunns 20 lawsuit
  • Groundswell: change agents such as whistle blowers, proponents of the “rights” of nature, and shareholders wanting ethical investments
  • The mill: Gunns pulp mill saga, the beginning of the an end?

The story is a complex one, delving into competing interests within the logging industry itself – sawlogs versus woodchips, old-growth versus regrowth native forests versus plantations, public versus private forests – not to mention dissension amongst environmentalists and some very dirty politics. It is a story about jobs versus the environment and the “rights” of nature, of different value systems that set “unmanned” pristine forests against “manned” ones. It is a story of blaming and buck passing. And it is a story of half-truths and distorted truths, all in the name of defending one’s own patch. “I am on a journey through selective truths”, she writes at one point in the book.

This issue of “truths” is beautifully conveyed in her discussion of the timber industry’s language:

I find myself constantly having to decipher new words. Nature needs “disturbance”, logging is “harvesting”, deforestation is “afforestation”, burning woodchips for electricity is a form of “bio-fuel” or “renewable energy”. Woodchips are “feedstock”, while the non-commercial attributes of a forest are “non-wood values”.

The word-games though work on both sides. As she says, “evoking napalm, Hiroshima and the holocaust to describe logging is manipulative”.

A major argument presented by the logging workers is the economic one – jobs – but Krien estimates from the information given her that forestry “accounts for no more than 3% of the workforce”. In fact, she suggests that machines may be a bigger threat to timber jobs than “any greenie”. The more cynical amongst us might think that it is not so much about “jobs” but about “big business”. Sometimes, of course, big business means jobs, but that’s not always necessarily so, not if much of the work can be automated (or, sometimes, though not necessarily here, moved off-shore).

I can’t begin to convey all the information she presents in this book – the history, the statistics, the science, the criss-crossing relationships, not to mention the people, the overt and covert deals, and the truly horrifying violence (both actual and threatened). There are times when I started to feel bogged down in the complexity of it all, but I was reassured when I realised she was feeling it too. She is, in fact, like Hooper, taking us on a journey – but it is a journey that, despite her very real efforts to explore the whole story, does lean to one side, that of those who wish to protect not destroy. As she says in the last chapter:

I’ve tried to balance my seesaw heart, carefully weighing up each argument. But there is something about this island that wants you to choose sides.

I can understand that – it is, in many ways, a magical place. However, I do have one complaint about the book – my ongoing one for books of this ilk – and that is its lack of an index. It is jam-packed with people, events, places, philosophies and theories but how can the casual reader or researcher find them?

And so, is there a resolution to it all? Well no, but there is, she says, a universal story:

… in the greater scheme of things, the island is nothing but a drop in the ocean. But the story is universal – and what goes on in Tasmania goes on in the Pacific islands, in other continents, until it all comes back over the ice to Tasmania again. … Deep down in our bones we must know – we must know that nothing we do is done in isolation. Cause and effect: how did it get so noisy in between?

How indeed? Read this thoughtful, throughly researched book, and you will, unfortunately, find out.

Anna Krien
Into the woods: The battle for Tasmania’s forests
Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010
302pp.
ISBN: 9781863954877

(Review copy supplied by Black Inc)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Elizabeth von Arnim

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Cover of "All the Dogs of My Life"

All the Dogs of My Life (Courtesy: Vintage Books, via Amazon)

This week’s Monday musings is a bit cheeky since Elizabeth von Arnim (or Mary Annette Beauchamp, her birth-name) was born in Sydney in 1866 but her parents left Australia in 1871 for Switzerland and then England. Von Arnim spent the rest of her life abroad. So, why am I writing about her? She didn’t grow up in Australia and doesn’t write about it either. Well, it’s because I love her writing and thought I could use the Australian birth justification to write about her now rather than later. After all, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want to!

Before I talk about her writing, it’s worth mentioning that she has a famous relation: her first cousin was Katherine Mansfield (born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888). But this isn’t the only name-dropping that can be done. The writer E.M. Forster tutored her children at one stage, she had a three-year relationship with H.G. Wells, and she married (but soon regretted it) Bertrand Russell‘s older brother. In other words, she had an interesting life.

I have read a few of her 20 or so books:

And, I have Vera (1921), which some see as her best, on my TBR pile.

So, why do I like her? Well, not only is her main theme, at least from the books I’ve read to date, women’s lack of power in a male-dominated world but, like Jane Austen, she approaches this with wit and irony and with a clear eye for human failings in general. In other words, she empathised with women’s lot but wasn’t blind to their faults and foibles (as individuals, as women and as representatives of humanity). Just read Mr Skeffington, and you will see what I mean.

To give you a sense of her writing, here are the opening paras of her “memoir” All the dogs of my life:

I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs. In my day and turn having been each of the above – except that instead of husbands I was wives – I know what I am talking about, and am well acquainted with the ups and downs, the daily ups and downs, the sometimes almost hourly ones in the thinskinned, which seem inevitably to accompany human loves.

Dogs are free from these fluctuations. Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath.

That is how I like to be loved.

Therefore I will write of dogs.

How can you not be captivated by such a wry writer? The book continues in this teasing tone. She insists it is not her autobiography (“as this isn’t an autobiography, I needn’t go into that” is a refrain), but a story of her dogs, and regularly tells us so. But of course, through the story of her dogs, we get a pretty good impression of her life. She may not give us all the details, but we certainly learn about many of her “ups and downs”. This book, though, was not my introduction to von Arnim: that goes to the delightful Elizabeth and her German garden.

In a recent post, Max of Pechorin’s journal wrote that “the line between novel and memoir can be a tricky one”. I immediately thought of Elizabeth and her German garden, which I first read back in the mid 1980s. This is, I believe, a novel (in diary form) but it is also rather close to her life. She did, like the Elizabeth of the book, marry a German (count) and she did call him, as she does in the book, “The Man of wrath”. Furthermore, she did have several children. In fact her second book, The solitary summer, is dedicated “To the man of wrath, with some apologies and much love”.  Anyhow, here is the Elizabeth in the novel:

The people about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when you can get someone to cook for you?

OK, so she is well-to-do … but still, I love her priorities! Here she is in her (aforementioned) memoir, speaking of herself and one of her dogs:

Fortunately we liked the same things. She only wanted to be outdoors in the sun, and so did I …

And so, while some of the facts may differ (though I don’t know which ones), the basic “truth” of her life – her likes, dislikes and, more to the point, her attitudes and personality, come through both books.

Elizabeth von Arnim was a woman who tackled life head on. Her first husband died, she had affairs and a failed marriage; she lived in England, Europe and the USA; and she met some of the significant thinkers and writers of her time.  But, through it all, she never lost sight of “women’s lot” and the psychological ramifications of their powerlessness. Here she is in Elizabeth and her German garden on migrant workers:

From us they get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they can eat. The women get less, not because they work less but because they are women and must not be encouraged.

There is also, in the same book, an extended – and infuriating – discussion between Elizabeth, the Man of Wrath, and two others on German women having the same (lack of) rights as children and idiots. But politics was not her main game, I think. Rather, she was interested in women’s lives, in their wish and need to make self-determined, meaningful lives for themselves. So, I might just finish with another little excerpt from All the dogs of my life:

What on earth did I, of all people, want with a lot of husbands? I asked myself in wonder. Besides, by readily sticking to poached eggs for dinner I was getting abreast of my expenses, and the bills of Saturdays held no more terrors for me.

Ha! What indeed (at least in those inequitable days)!

Kate Chopin, Désireé’s baby

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Kate Chopin

Chopin (Public domain, via Wikipedia)

I read Kate Chopin‘s short story “Désireé’s baby” (1893) back in March when Kirsty mentioned it in her comment on my last Chopin post, but I didn’t blog it then. However, when it appeared a couple of weeks ago as a Library of America selection, I felt its time had come. But, what to say? It is, in a word, gut-wrenching.

The first short story to create a lasting impression on me was Guy de Maupassant‘s “The necklace” (1884). It was that short story, really, that launched my enjoyment of short stories. I found them particularly appropriate for my student days when I couldn’t justify reading a novel but wanted some escape from set texts. I was consequently interested to read in the Library of America’s introductory notes to “Désireé’s baby” that Chopin has been compared to such writers as Maupassant and Flaubert. I can see the connection.

“Désireé’s baby” starts off gently – and, more to the point, innocuously:

As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmondé drove over to L’Abri to see Désireé and the baby.

It made her laugh to think of Désireé with a baby. Why, it seemed but yesterday that Désireé was little more than a baby herself…

We then discover that Désireé had been an abandoned baby and brought up by the childless Madame Valmondé and her husband, hence I suppose her name. As this (very) short story unfolds, subtle hints of something not quite idyllic are introduced. A young man of an old wealthy family, Armand Aubigny, falls in love with and insists on marrying the nameless, but now 18-year-old Désireé. He fell in love “the way all the Augibgnys fell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot”. What an odd image to use for love eh?

Then we hear that Aubigny is a strict master of his estate. The home is “sad-looking” with its roof “black like a cowl” and “solemn oaks” growing near it. And, more telling, under his rule “his negroes had forgotten to be gay, as they had been during the old master’s easy-going and indulgent lifetime”. Set against this is Désireé in her “soft white muslins and laces”, so we are not surprised when we read that

Marriage, and the birth of his son, had softened Armand Aubigny’s imperious and exacting nature greatly. This was what made the gentle Désireé so happy, for she loved him desperately. When he frowned she trembled, but loved him. When he smiled, she asked no greater blessing of God. But Armand’s dark, handsome face had not often been disfigured by frowns since the day he fell in love with her.

Now, there is a clue to the dénouement in this excerpt, but if you don’t know the plot I’m not giving it away. All I’ll say is that Chopin’s writing is superb in the way she uses imagery and irony to subtly set the scene and leave the clues so that the conclusion, though shocking, meets Amanda Lohrey’s criteria for endings.

In less than 6 pages, Chopin explores a complex set of themes, including the psychological and social ramifications of young love, old wealth, race and gender, with a clarity that is breath-taking. I’m not surprised that it is a much-anthologised and studied story.

On endings – in novels, that is

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Road Ends sign

The End! (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

Australian writer, Amanda Lohrey, was interviewed on this morning’s Bookshow about her new book, a collection of short stories titled Reading Madame Bovary, which Lisa at ANZLitLovers has well reviewed. I’m not going to talk about the interview here in any detail, but I did think she had something interesting to say about endings, particularly given the last two books I’ve read whose endings were a little surprising.

Before getting to Lohrey, though, let’s just recap EM Forster‘s famous (well, I like it anyhow) statement about endings in his Aspects of the novel:

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? … Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the dénouement … most novels do fail here – there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude.

Oh dear…that is certainly how novels in the past usually concluded isn’t it? Modern – Modernist and, particularly, Postmodernist (but don’t test me too closely on literary theory because I haven’t made a close study of it) – novels are more likely to have an open ending. They don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that there must be a dénouement that ties everything up (except perhaps for genre fiction?) which creates a challenge for readers. You get to the end of an open-ended novel and are forced to ask “What was that about?”. With a traditionally ended novel, all you have to say is, well, boy met girl, boy lost girl, boy got girl again. Of course, it was usually about something else but a simple, straightforward plot can discourage further thought about the “about” question.

Amanda Lohrey expressed it this way. She said “I think that surprise is absolutely essential to satisfying fiction” but this surprise must not be too absurd, extreme or contrived. Rather it should be something that gives you a “hit of adrenaline”, that you didn’t see coming but makes you think “yes, of course, that must be how it will end”. She goes on to say that “plot isn’t everything” but there must be a journey…

So, where does all this leave us? Take my two recent reads. There was some consternation among my reading friends about the ending of Lionel Shriver’s So much for that. It was pretty much a surprise – but the question is whether it meets the second part of Lohrey’s criteria. For some it was a cop-out and diluted the novel’s intent but that, of course, depends on what you think the intent is. My other example is John Banville‘s The Infinities. It also had a surprising ending that could also be seen as a cop-out but, when I stop to think about it, particularly its somewhat playful tone, the ending did in fact make sense. (It’s telling, I think, that  part of the surprise of these two potentially “copout” endings is that they are reasonably positive!)

All this said, I must say that I often forget the ending of novels I’ve read (unless they’re of the traditional marriage or death variety). What I tend not to forget though is the tone and my emotional reaction – and that is good enough for me. What about you? What do you think about endings and do you have any favourite or problematic ones?

Monday musings on Australian literature: The gum tree in the Australian imagination

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In the next week (I hope), I’ll be reviewing Anna Krien’s Into the forest, her investigation into the longstanding conflict over logging native forests in our southernmost state, Tasmania. In the meantime, though, as I’ve been reading the book, I’ve been thinking again of the role eucalypts play in Australian life and culture – and, voilà, this week’s Monday musings was born.

Salmon Gum (Eucalyptus Tintinnans)

Salmon Gum (probably Eucalyptus Tintinnans) at Nitmiluk National Park

But, where to start? Why not with Waltzing Australia, an American blogger who has travelled extensively in Australia, written a book as a result, and is now writing a blog about her experiences? She complained – nicely of course – in our little comment to-and-fro about her visit to my city that “My whole first day there, I didn’t see any gum trees, and that made it almost seem that I’d somehow left Australia”. If that doesn’t tell you something about gums and Australia nothing will!

My first memorable literary confrontation with gum trees came in the childhood classic, Seven little Australians (1894), which is, perhaps, to Australian girls what Little women is to American. It is about a family of children and includes a tragic death, but here the death is caused not by illness but, yes, by a falling gum:

There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. …They lifted it off the little bodies, the long silvered trunk with the gum dead and dried in streaks upon it… (from Seven little Australians, by Ethel Turner).

Never fails to move me. As for which of the seven is so tragically killed, my lips are sealed, but let’s just say that, in contrast to Alcott’s book, it is not the meek, mild one.

As backdrop or centre front, gums are rarely absent from our literature, but the next most memorable example for me has to be Murray Bail‘s mysterious and beautiful novel, Eucalyptus, which can be read as a modern fairy story: once upon a time there was a father who promised the hand of his daughter to the man who could name each eucalyptus species that the father had carefully and lovingly planted on his property. The book starts as follows:

We could begin with desertorum, common name hooked mallee … and anyway, the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origin in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation …

It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-coloured – can we say that?) hardluck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here.

If you haven’t gathered a sense of Bail’s tone and intent from this, you might when I tell you that the last species mentioned in the book is Eucalyptus Confluens! It is fairy story, a love story, and a meditation on stories, framed by gums in all their diversity: “A forest is language; accumulated years”.

In Peter Temple‘s Truth, which I reviewed here a month or so ago, a running motif is the eucalypt and oak forest planted by Villani and his father. The trees provide an important point of contact for father and son throughout their lives, and the forest’s survival in the fire at the end signifies the survival too of Villani’s relationship with his father.

Often of course, gums are simply the backdrop – the ever-present part of the landscape that makes that landscape recognisably Australian. They are an important part of the landscape in Chambers’ The vintage and the gleaning … just by being there.

The thing is, though, that gums are so ubiquitous that they can become clichéd. The 1930s was an important and active time in Australian literature – and a time when there was enthusiasm for defining and creating literature that was, in a word, Australian. Australian poet, Rex Ingamells wrote, in 1938, an article titled “Conditional culture” in which he explored “the state of the art” of Australian literature. Not surprisingly, gums pop up several times in the article, often to show failures in the Australian imagination, such as when gums are invoked in nondescript ways. However, he also sees them as a barometer for the maturation of our culture:

Before long, the strange, unorthodox beauty of the Australian gum tree, and many other manifestations of beauty peculiar to this country, will find a sure place in the standards of general culture, which will be one stage nearer universality and so much the richer.

All this makes me wonder whether there is anything similar – any motif that has as much universal recognition – in other national literatures? Anyone?

(Oh, and just in case you are interested, there is a pretty extensive listing of eucalyptus species at Wikipedia.)

Books into films

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‘Do you mind what they did to your book?’
‘Well, they can’t do anything to my book. They can’t alter a single comma … ‘

I came across the above in an article about P. D. James‘ in the September issue of goodreading magazine. The discussion relates to her non-crime novel The children of men which was adapted into film. What a great response I thought, because …

Pride and Prejudice (1940 film)

1940 film adaptation (Image via Wikipedia - Presumed public domain?)

I tend to take a pretty relaxed view towards adaptations. I see books and films as completely different media. Rather than expect the film to replicate the book, I like to see how the filmmaker has interpreted it. These are the questions I ask myself:

  • First: Did I enjoy the film as a film? Did I like the story? Did I like the way it was acted, directed, photographed, scripted? What did it “say” to me? Did it move and/or entertain me?
  • And then, if I’ve read the book, I think about the filmmakers’ interpretation. What was their take on it? Did it accord with mine? If it didn’t accord with mine, was it an interesting take? Was it a valid take?

And so, for example, I am one of the few Jane Austen fans who likes Patricia Rozema‘s Mansfield Park. Her Fanny is certainly not the Fanny of the book, but she is an interesting creation nonetheless and, as I see it, an attempt by Rozema to “update” her and to invest her more clearly with the strength of mind that she clearly has but that many readers lose because her “issues” (such as not taking part in the play) seem “wimpy” to modern eyes.  (This is not the only point of difference in the film, but discussing these is not the point of my post).

A poster on the Ellen and Jim blog has attempted a “classification” of film adaptations, using Jane Austen as an example. Here it is:

  • Close (or faithful) adaptations (such as the Pride and Prejudice film, 1995, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle), meaning “literal transposition of plot hinge-points, keeping most major characters, important crises, dialogue, themes”;
  • Intermediate (or analogous) adaptations (such as Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, 1999), in which “the film-makers drop hinge-points or characters, change enunciations, and alter the book’s themes, even radically”; and
  • Free (or loose) adaptations (such as Clueless, 1995), meaning “a transposition into modern or other era terms which keeps only enough idiosyncratic elements of the major story and characters to be recognizably partly derived from the book”.

You will know my approach to adaptations when I say I enjoyed all three examples I selected above – which is not the same as saying that I think all adaptations work. I was less enamoured, for example, of the 2007 ITV adaptation of Mansfield Park. It had the unfortunate effect of making me laugh – at the wrong time for the wrong reasons – and its plot changes did not seem to me to enhance the themes.

Further on in the Ellen and Jim blog post is this from John le Carré on the adaptation of his The Constant Gardener:

the job of the movie … is to take the minimum intention of the novel and illustrate it with the maximum of freedom in movie language in movie grammar.

That sounds very reasonable to me, but now I wonder about you, as I know a few readers here are keen moviegoers. What makes a successful adaptation to you? How important is fidelity – however you define that – to you? And, if you like, what are some of your favourite adaptations?

John Banville, The infinities

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Hermes, sculpted bronze figure by Lee Lawrie. ...

Hermes, sculpted bronze figure by Lee Lawrie (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia

This is what Benny loves, what all the gods love, to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others.

Hmm … this is also, I think, what readers love! Readers after all are, surely, the ultimate voyeurs. And yet the god Hermes, who narrates John Banville‘s The infinities, also admits to the gods interfering in people’s lives, which is, in a way, what authors do. Is this double whammy – voyeur and meddler – one of the reasons why Banville chose a Greek god as his narrator?

The infinities is one of those books that takes place in a day, and it has a fairly small cast of characters. Adam Sr has had a stroke and is ostensibly on his deathbed. He is being cared for by his much younger second wife Ursula and his somewhat “loony” daughter, Petra. Also living on Adam’s Irish estate are the middle-aged employees Ivy Blount and Duffy.  The novel starts in the morning with the arrival of son, also Adam, and his wife, the aptly named Helen. During the day two more people arrive, separately, Roddy Wagstaff and Benny Grace. The only other characters are two Greek Gods, the narrator Hermes and his “father” Zeus.

You might presume from this that the novel is one of those traditional deathbed stories about a family which gathers to await the death of a loved one and lets loose their pent-up conflicts, but it’s not so. This is a more interior novel in which the interaction between the characters is less important than their individual responses to their rather messy lives. They are overseen by Hermes who watches with amusement and not a little envy while also trying to keep his father, the “randy” Zeus, in check.

Unlike The sea, that more sombre novel of Banville’s, this one has a light if not downright funny touch. The gods roam at will around the estate, occasionally taking the form of other characters in order to meddle a bit in their lives, or, in the case of Zeus in particular, experience a little human pleasure with the luscious Helen (“‘Oh’, she says laughing, ‘it was divine, surely'”). Some of the names are symbolic – Helen, of course, recalls Helen of Troy; Adam reminds us of the “first” man; Adam’s last name is Godley. But this isn’t overdone. Not all names are so laden with meaning – and those that are have a more playful than serious import. Added to this is the delightful humanising informality of Hermes talking of Zeus as “Dad”.

So, what is it all about? Adam Sr is (was) a mathematician who explored Quantum theory and developed his own theory of multiple infinities. By contrast, the gods of course are infinite (or, more accurately, immortal), but they envy humans their mortality. Hermes says of his father’s flirtations with women:

Each time he dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known.

Towards the end Adam realises what the gods already know, that “somehow, extension brought not increase but dissipation”. He says:

I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail. We hung back from it, exhausted in advance by the mere fact of its suddenly being there. It was, in a word, too much for us. This is what we discovered, to our chagrin and shame: that we had enough, more than enough, already, in the bewildering diversities of our old and overabundant world. Let the gods live at peace in that far, new place.

Ha! Except the gods already know what Adam and Benny learnt, which is why they keep hanging around the humans. They know that it is death that somehow gives life its meaning. This makes the ending, which I will not give away here, doubly ironic.

It feels impossible to do justice to this superficially simple but rather astonishing book and I have already laboured over my post far too long, so I’ll just make a couple more comments. One is the shifting POV from our narrator Hermes to interior monologues from others, particularly Adam Sr. It seems, at times, that Adam is Hermes, something both disconcerting yet also oddly logical. And there is the tight, evocative language. Take, for example, his use of colour. There’s a lot of blue-black-grey which expresses well the hovering death and its associated mystery, but there are also hints of the more earthy of-the-world green-brown colours and, in the cushion clutched by Ursula, a touch of passionate red. Banville’s intent can almost be read by simply tracking the colours.

In the end, the book is a hymn to the mortal world, in all the messiness that’s been laid before us:

This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant.

Couldn’t have said it better myself!

John Banville
The infinities
London: Picador, 2009
300pp.
ISBN: 978033045025

Lionel Shriver, So much for that

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Lionel Shriver, So much for that

Book cover (Courtesy: HarperCollins Australia)

Having had my own rather traumatic experience of the American healthcare system back in the 1980s I was rather keen to read Lionel Shriver‘s latest offering, So much for that. And, I wasn’t disappointed – or, let me rephrase that, I found it an interesting and engaging page-turner though not a top-ten-of-the-year one.

First a quick plot summary. The book starts with 48-year-old nice-guy Shep Knacker planning to escape the American rat-race to his dreamed of, and as it turns out ironically named, AfterLife in Pemba off Zanzibar. Unfortunately, his plans turn sour with his wife’s announcement that she has a rare aggressive cancer called peritoneal mesothelioma and will need him to continue working, for his health insurance. Paralleling Shep and Glynis’ experience of health service and insurance – and told in roughly alternating chapters – is that of their good friends Jackson and Carol whose 16-year-old daughter, Flicka, was born with the degenerative disease, familial dysautonomia.

So, at the start we have a terminal cancer diagnosis and a child with a disease that is not likely to see her making old bones. Through the course of the novel, two more health issues are thrown in to round out the mix – aged care for Shep’s father after he falls and breaks his femur, and elective shall-we-say “vanity” surgery undertaken with disastrous results by Jackson. This all felt a little contrived to me – as did the occasional preachy dialogue that seemed to be there to make sure we got it. (Shriver is not a taker-outer I think!)

But, somehow, Shriver made it all work – right through to the rather surprising and, thus, risky ending. I liked the fact that she balanced the health care polemics with some wider issues such as the psychology and language of illness and the soul-destroying nature of the American (in particular) rat-race. And I liked the way she offset the plot and structural contrivances with a warm but unsentimental regard for her characters. Glynis and Flicka are not “pin-up” patients but “real” people who are angry with their lot and exhibit selfishness and petulance more often than meek forbearance. Glynis, like the character in Helen Garner‘s The spare room, is in denial about her fate pretty much to the end, and Flicka sees little value in living the sort of life she does. Both consequently feel little need to make it easier for those around them.

Most of Shep’s chapters commence with a statement of his net worth, which at the beginning of the novel is around $730K but which decreases with alarming rapidity as the months wear on and his poor insurance cover doesn’t begin to meet the costs of Glynis’ treatment. If you knew nothing before about co-payments, deductibles, co-insurers, out-of-network providers and lifetime payment caps, you’ll know all about them by the time you finish the book. (Apparently the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is medical debt.) But this is just the background – the polemics if you will – because the more interesting story is that of Shep and Glynis’ complicated but loving relationship, and of how friends and family react to the diagnosis. We feel Shep’s pain as he realises “he couldn’t fix things”. We understand Glynis’ eventual epiphany that “her husband had misguidedly hoarded his pennies, when the only currency they spent that had ever counted was time”. We cringe when we recognise ourselves in the friends who don’t visit often enough, who offer lip-service assistance rather than actual help. And we start to understand the real implications of cancer-speak that encourages an unrealistic belief in positive thinking, that suggests you can win the battle if you fight hard enough:

I know you mean well [says Shep to the oncologist], but after all this military talk she now equates – dying – with dishonor. With failure. With personal failure.

Near the end Shep asks the doctor what the $2 million spent on Glynis’ treatment (to date) had bought:

“Oh, I bet we’ve probably extended her life a good three months.”
“No, I’m sorry, Dr Goldman,” Shep said on the way out. “They were not a good three months”.

… leaving the real question, which Shep had previously asked his father, hanging:

“is there also a limit to how much you should pay to keep any one person alive?”

Lionel Shriver does not specifically answer this question in the novel but – despite the ending – you know exactly what she thinks.

There is more I could say about the novel. The story of Jackson and Carol, for example, offers the book more than a simple confirming parallel. There are some genuinely funny moments, particularly those between Shep and his free-loading sister Beryl, and those when Jackson pronounces yet another long-winded title for the book on “mugs and moochers” that he never will write. And there are some interesting discussions about art and artists, and about parenting in modern USA. But I’ve said enough I think to give a sense of what this book is about.

Shep says at the end that he’d “rather live a good story than read one”. I’ll leave you to ponder the implications of a novelist writing that line … and simply say that while this is not a perfect novel, I don’t begrudge having given up a bit of my good life to read it!

Lionel Shriver
So much for that
Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2010
433pp.
ISBN: 9780732287030

Monday musings on Australian literature: In praise of the “taker-outers”

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Today’s Monday musings post is not solely about Australian literature but it was inspired by an Australian writer, Kate Jennings, about whom I’ve written a few times in the last month or so. In 2002 she wrote an essay titled “Bone and sinew”, for our now defunct Bulletin magazine, in which she praises short novels (or, novellas*). Tony of Tony’s Bookworld likes novellas, and so do I.

Anyhow, Jennings starts her essay with a statement that F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently made to Thomas Wolfe. He said:

You’re a putter-in, and I’m a taker-outer.

It seems that Wolfe believed a novelist couldn’t be taken seriously until, to use Jennings words, “he or she had produced something that could hold up a three-legged sofa”. Jennings likes Scott Fitzgerald’s description and goes on to say:

Putters-in and takers-out – as good a way as any to classify novelists. Putters-in: writers who pile on atmosphere, adjectives ad arguments, who share with readers all their thoughts, and research, who follow storylines like a dog on the loose. Takers-out: writers who fiddle with each comma and finesse every word, who know exactly what Samuel Johnson meant when he said that when you think you’ve written a particularly fine passage, strike it out.

Jennings admits to her bias – after all, she says, she’s written a couple of short novels herself – but says she does also enjoy  the likes of George Eliot, Christina Stead, Patrick White and Rohinton Mistry. Her point is that their novels are not “superior because of their length” and that short novels should not be perceived as “slight” simply because they are “slim”. There are many short novels with proven staying power (such as The great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s The heart of darkness and George Orwell‘s Animal farm) and yet, she says, publishers, recognising that readers and reviewers are prejudiced against shortness, “often ask writers to pad out short novels with stories. The term ‘novella’ is now pejorative: a marketing kiss of death”.

Well, it isn’t for me. Jennings quotes David Mamet on elegance in writing. He asked “how much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible”. I like this way of describing it. Taker-outers, I believe, trust their readers, viewers and listeners (because this also works for theatre, film and music) to get it. They don’t believe they have to explain every detail. Kate Jennings certainly doesn’t in Snake. She presents a series of little vignettes and expects her readers to “get” the whole picture – and we do, only too vividly!

Kate Grenville with her cello

The versatile Kate Grenville (Courtesy: Peter Ellis via Wikipedia using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Fortunately for me, many of my favourite Australian writers (hmm … is this a “chicken or the egg” situation?) have written short novels (as well as, for some, longer novels). I have listed some before and so here will add some others, mostly lesser known, that have impressed me:

  • Thea Astley’s Coda
  • Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse
  • David Malouf’s Ransom
  • Eva Sallis’ The city of sealions
  • Tim Winton’s In the winter dark

Jennings writes “That short novels can be tough, specific and encompassing can come as a surprise to readers. Sinew and bone …”. Really, though, it’s a matter of what you read for. If your preference is to escape into fat and flesh, then short novels may not be for you, but if you like chewier fare, then a good short novel will rarely disappoint.

* I think novellas are generally defined as those under 150 pages, but I tend to include in my personal definition books that are up to 200 pages (or so).