Spring Reads, Part II: Blossomise, Spring Chicken & Cold Spring Harbor
Our garden is an unruly assortment of wildflowers, rosebushes, fruit trees and hedge plants, along with an in-progress pond, and we’ve made a few half-hearted attempts at planting vegetable seeds and flower bulbs. It felt more like summer earlier in May, before we left for France; as the rest of the spring plays out, we’ll see if the beetroot, courgettes, radishes and tomatoes amount to anything. The gladioli have certainly been shooting for the sky!
I recently encountered spring (if only in name) through these three books, a truly mixed bag: a novelty poetry book memorable more for the illustrations than for the words, a fascinating popular account of the science of ageing, and a typically depressing (if you know the author, anyway) novel about failing marriages and families. Part I of my Spring Reading was here.
Blossomise by Simon Armitage; illus. Angela Harding (2024)
Armitage has been the Poet Laureate for yonks now, but I can’t say his poetry has ever made much of an impression on me. That’s especially true of this slim volume commissioned by the National Trust: it’s 3 stars for Angela Harding’s lovely if biologically inaccurate (but I’ll be kind and call them whimsical) engravings, and 2 stars for the actual poems, which are light on content. Plum, cherry, apple, pear, blackthorn and hawthorn blossom loom large. It’s hard to describe spring without resorting to enraptured clichés, though: “Planet Earth in party mode, / petals fizzing and frothing / like pink champagne.” The haiku (11 of 21 poems) feel particularly tossed-off: “The streets are learning / the language of plum blossom. / The trees have spoken.” But others are sure to think more of this than I did.
A favourite passage: “Scented and powdered / she’s staging / a one-tree show / with hi-viz blossoms / and lip-gloss petals; / she’ll season the pavements / and polished stones / with something like snow.” (Public library) 
Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford (2015)
Gifford was in his mid-forties when he undertook this quirky journey into the science and superstitions of ageing. As a starting point, he ponders the differences between his grandfather, who swam and worked his orchard until his death from infection at 86, and his great-uncle, not so different in age, who developed Alzheimer’s and died in a nursing home at 74. Why is the course of ageing so different for different people? Gifford suspects that, in this case, it had something to do with Uncle Emerson’s adherence to the family tradition of Christian Science and refusal to go to the doctor for any medical concern. (An alarming fact: “The Baby Boom generation is the first in centuries that has actually turned out to be less healthy than their parents, thanks largely to diabetes, poor diet, and general physical laziness.”) But variation in healthspan is still something of a mystery.
Over the course of the book, Gifford meets all number of researchers and cranks as he attends conferences, travels to spend time with centenarians and scientists, and participates in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. There have been some truly zany ideas about how to pause or reverse aging, such as self-dosing with hormones (Suzanne Somers is one proponent), but long-term use is discouraged. Some things that do help, to an extent, are calorie restriction and periodic fasting plus, possibly, red wine, coffee and aspirin. But the basic advice is nothing we don’t already know about health: don’t eat too much and exercise, i.e., avoid obesity. The layman-interpreting-science approach reminded me of Mary Roach’s. There was some crossover in content with Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine and various books I’ve read about dementia. Fun and enlightening. (New purchase – bargain book from Dollar Tree, Bowie, MD) 
Cold Spring Harbor by Richard Yates (1986)
Cold Spring Harbor is a Long Island hamlet whose name casts an appropriately chilly shadow over this slim novel about families blighted by alcoholism and poor decisions. Evan Shepard, only in his early twenties, already has a broken marriage behind him after a teenage romance led to an unplanned pregnancy. Mary and their daughter Kathleen seem to be in the rearview mirror as he plans to return to college for an engineering degree. One day he accompanies his father into New York City for an eye doctor appointment and the car breaks down. The men knock on a random door and thereby become entwined with the Drakes: Gloria, the unstable, daytime-drinking mother; Rachel, her beautiful daughter; and Phil, her earnest but unconfident adolescent son.
Evan and Rachel soon marry and agree to Gloria’s plan of sharing a house in Cold Spring Harbor, where the Shepards live (Evan’s mother is also an alcoholic, but less functional; she hides behind the “invalid” label). Take it from me: living with your in-laws is never a good idea! As the Second World War looms, and with Evan and Rachel expecting a baby, it’s clear something will have to give with this uneasy family arrangement, but the dramatic break I was expecting – along the lines of a death or accident – never arrived. Instead, there’s just additional slow crumbling, and the promise of greater suffering to come. Although Yates’s character portraits are as penetrating as in Easter Parade, I found the plot a little lacklustre here. (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh) 
Any ‘spring’ reads for you recently?
Review Catch-up: Matt Gaw, Sheila Heti, Liz Jensen (and a Pile of DNFs)
Today I have a travel book about appreciating nature in any weather, a sui generis memoir drawn from a decade of diaries, and an impassioned cry for the environment in the wake of a young adult son’s death.
I’m also bidding farewell to a whole slew of review books that have been hanging around, in some cases, for literal years – I think one is from 2021, and several others from 2022. Putting a book on my “set aside” shelf can be a kiss of death … or I can go back at a better time and end up loving it. It’s hard to predict which will occur. On these, alas, I have had to admit defeat and will pass the books on to other homes.
In All Weathers: A Journey through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice and Everything in Between by Matt Gaw
Gaw’s two previous nature/travel memoirs, the enjoyable The Pull of the River and Under the Stars, involve gentle rambles through British landscapes, along with commentary on history, nature and science. The remit is much the same here. The book is split into four long sections: “Rain,” “Fog,” “Ice and Snow,” and “Wind.” The adventures always start from and end up at the author’s home in Suffolk, but he ranges as far as the Peak District, Cumbria and the Isle of Skye. Wild swimming is one way in which he experiences places. He notices a lot and describes it all in lovely and relatable prose.
I was tickled by the definitions of, and statistics about, a “white Christmas”: in the UK, it counts if there’s even a single snowflake falling, whereas in the US there has to be 2.5 cm or more of standing snow. (Scotland is most likely to experience white Christmases; it has had 37 since 1960 vs. 26 in northern England. The English snow record is 43 cm, at Buxton and Malham Tarn in 1981 and 2009.) There’s underlying mild dread as he notes how weather patterns have changed and will likely continue changing, ever more dramatically, into his children’s future.
I find I don’t have much to say about this book because it is very nice but doesn’t do anything interesting or tackle anything that isn’t familiar from many other nature books (such as Rain by Melissa Harrison and Forecast by Joe Shute). It’s unfortunate for Gaw that his ideas often seem to have been done before – his book on night-walking, in particular, was eclipsed by several other works on that topic that came out at around the same time. I hope that the next time around he’ll get more editorial guidance to pursue original topics. It might take just a little push to get him to the next level where he could compete with top UK nature writers.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson Books for the free copy for review.
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Heti put the contents of ten years of her diaries into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence (including articles), and then ruthlessly culled the results until she had a 25-chapter (no ‘X’) book. You could hardly call it a narrative, yet looking for one is so hardwired that every few sentences you are jolted out of what feels like a mini-story and into something new. Instead, you might think of it as an autobiographical mosaic. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of Heti’s oeuvre, with obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity. But there are also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Tendrils of the everyday poke out here and there as she makes a meal, catches a plane, or buys clothes. Men loom large: explicit accounts of sex with Pavel and Lars (though also Fiona); advising her friend Lemons on his love life. There are also meta musings on what she is trying to achieve with her book projects and on what literature can be.
Grammatically, the document is a lot more interesting than it could be – or than a similar experiment based on my diary would be, for instance – because Heti sometimes writes in incomplete sentences, dropping the initial pronoun; or intersperses rhetorical questions or notes to self in the imperative. So, yes, ‘I’ is a long chapter, but not only because of self-absorbed “I…” statements; there’s also plenty of “If…” and “It’s…” ‘H’ and ‘W’ are longer sections than might be expected because of the questioning mode. But it’s at the sentence level that the book makes the biggest impression: lines group together, complement or contradict each other, or flout coherence by being so merrily à propos of nothing. Here are a few passages to give a flavour:
Am I wasting my time? Am low on money. Am making noodles. Am reading Emma. Am tired and will go to sleep. Am tired today and I feel like I may be getting a cold. Ambivalence gives you something to do, something to think about.
Best not to live too emotionally in the future—it hardly ever comes to pass. Better to be on the outside, where you have always been, all your life, even in school, nothing changes. Better to look outward than inward. Blow jobs and tenderness. Books that fall in between the cracks of all aspects of the human endeavour.
It’s 2:34 every time I check the time these days. It’s 4 p.m. It’s 4:41 now. It’s a fantasy of being saved. It’s a stupid idea. It’s a yellow, cloudy sky. It’s amazing to me how life keeps going. It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.
Scrambled eggs on toast at Yaddo. Second-guessing everything. Second, he said that no one is buying fiction. See the complexity. See the souls. See what kind of story the book can accommodate, if any. Seeing her for coffee was not so bad.
It’s surprising how much sense a text constructed so apparently haphazardly makes, perhaps because of the same subject and style throughout. Sometimes aphoristic, sometimes poetic (all that anaphora), the book is playful but overall serious about the capturing of a life on the page. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding the one-thing-after-another tedium of chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a more genuine, crystalline vision of the self than precise scenes and cause-and-effect chains ever could. A work of life writing like no other, it must be read in a manner all its own that it teaches you as you go along. I admire it enormously and hope I might write something even half as daring one day.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Your Wild and Precious Life: On grief, hope and rebellion by Liz Jensen
Jensen’s younger son, Raphaël Coleman, was just 25 when he collapsed while filming a documentary in South Africa and died of a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Raph had been involved in Extinction Rebellion and Jensen is a founding member of Writers Rebel. They both deemed activism “the best antidote to depression.” Her son had been obsessed with wildlife from a young age and was rewilding acres of their land in France, as well as making environmentalist films (he had achieved minor fame as a child actor in Nanny McPhee) and participating in direct action, such as at the Brazilian embassy in London.
For Jensen, the challenge, especially after lockdown confined her to her Copenhagen flat, was to channel grief into further radicalism rather than retreating into herself or giving in to the lure of suicide. She tried to see personal grief as a reminder of ecogrief, and therefore as a spur. One way that she coped was turning towards the supernatural. She continued to hear and speak to Raph, in daily life as well as through a medium, and interpreted bird sightings as signs of his continued presence. An additional point of interest to me was that the author’s husband is Carsten Jensen, the writer of one of my favourite books, We, the Drowned.
This doesn’t particularly stand out among the dozens of bereavement memoirs I’ve read. (It was also remarkably similar to Alexandra Fuller’s Fi, which I’d read not long before.) Perhaps more years of reflection would have helped – Mary Karr advises seven – though I suspect Jensen felt, quite rightly, that given the current state of the environment we have no time to waste. And I have no doubt that the combination of a mother’s love and an ecological conscience will make this book meaningful to many readers.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
And the DNFs…
there are more things, Yara Rodrigues Fowler – I loved Stubborn Archivist so much that I leapt at the chance to read her follow-up, but it was just too dull and involved about Brazilian versus UK politics. Nor did the stylistic tricks feel as novel this time around. I read 66 pages. (Fleet)
The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty – Gunty dazzled critics and prize judges in the USA, winning a National Book Award. I was drawn to her debut novel for the composite picture of the residents of one Indiana apartment building and the strange connections that develop between them over one summer week, including perhaps a murder? Blandine, the central character, is a sort of modern-day mystic but hard to warm to (“She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable”), as are all the characters. This felt like try-hard MFA writing. I read 85 pages. (Oneworld)
Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth, Claire Horn – I usually get on well with Wellcome Collection books. I think the problem here was that there was too much material that was familiar to me from having read Womb by Leah Hazard – even the SF-geared stuff about artificial wombs. I read 45 pages. (Profile Books)
Blessings, Chukwuebuka Ibeh – This debut novel has a confident voice, buttressed by determination to reveal what life is like for queer people living in countries where homosexuality is criminalized. Obiefuna is cast out for having a crush on Aboy, his father’s apprentice, even though the two young men share nothing more physical than a significant gaze into each other’s eyes. The strict boarding school his father sends him to is a place of privation, hierarchy, hazing and, I suspect, same-sex experimentation. I found the writing capable but couldn’t get past a sense of dread about what was going to happen. Meanwhile, I didn’t think the alternating chapters from Obiefuna’s mother’s perspective added anything to the narrative. I read 62 pages. (Penguin Viking)
The War for Gloria, Atticus Lish – Lish’s debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, was excellent, but I could never get stuck in to this follow-up, despite the appealing medical theme. When Gloria Goltz is diagnosed with ALS, her 15-year-old son Corey turns to his absent father and others for support. It was also unfortunate that Lish mentions the Ice Bucket Challenge: that was popularized in 2014, whereas the book is set in 2010. I read 75 pages. (Serpent’s Tail)
Snow Widows: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition through the Eyes of the Women They Left Behind, Katherine MacInnes – I seriously overestimated my interest in polar exploration narratives. MacInnes seems to have done quite a good job of creating novelistic scenes through research, though. I read 35 pages. (William Collins)
The Woodcock, Richard Smyth – I feel particularly bad about this one as I’ve read and enjoyed three of Smyth’s nature books and my husband and I are friendly with him on Twitter. Initially, I got Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent, anyway) vibes from this 1920s-set novel about the upheaval a naturalist and his wife experience when an American whaler and his daughters arrive in their small coastal English town. I read 90 pages. (Fairlight Books)
Better Broken than New: A Fragmented Memoir, Lisa St Aubin de Terán – I accepted this for review because I’d often seen the author’s name on spines in secondhand bookstores but didn’t know anything about her work. The précis of her globe-trotting life is stranger than fiction: marriage to a Venezuelan freedom fighter, managing a sugar plantation in the Andes, living in an Italian palace for 20 years, founding a charity in Mozambique. The vignettes in the early part of the book (e.g., skipping school and going on daytrips by train at age eight) are entertaining, if written with blithe disregard for a reader’s need for context or perspective. But the fragmented nature means it all feels as random as life, without the necessary authorial shaping. The publisher has done her a disservice as she seeks to relaunch her career by not proofreading properly: Many small errors slipped through the net, making this look like a sloppy manuscript. The worst happen to be other authors’ names: Jane ‘Austin’, ‘Kahil’ Gibran, Virginia ‘Wolfe’. Are you kidding me?! I read 53 pages. (Amaurea Press)
Reading about Mothers and Motherhood: Cosslett, Cusk, Emma Press Poetry, Heti, and Pachico
It was (North American) Mother’s Day at the weekend, an occasion I have complicated feelings about now that my mother is gone. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading and writing about mothering. At first I planned to divide my recent topical reads (one a reread) into two sets, one for ambivalence about becoming a mother and the other for mixed feelings about one’s mother. But the two are intertwined – especially in the poetry anthology I consider below – such that they feel more like facets of the same experience. I also review two memoirs (one classic; one not so much) and two novels (autofiction vs. science fiction).
The Year of the Cat: A Love Story by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (2023)
This was on my Most Anticipated list last year. A Covid memoir that features adopting a cat and agonizing over the question of whether to have a baby sounded right up my street. And in the earlier pages, in which Cosslett brings Mackerel the kitten home during the first lockdown and interrogates the stereotype of the crazy cat lady from the days of witches’ familiars onwards, it indeed seemed to be so. But the further I got, the more my pace through the book slowed to a limp; it took me 10 months to read, in fits and starts.
I’ve struggled to pinpoint what I found so off-putting, but I have a few hypotheses: 1) By the time I got hold of this, I’d tired of Covid narratives. 2) Fragmentary narratives can seem like profound reflections on subjectivity and silences. But Cosslett’s strategy of bouncing between different topics – worry over her developmentally disabled brother, time working as an au pair in France, PTSD from an attempted strangling by a stranger in London and being in Paris on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack – with every page or even every paragraph, feels more like laziness or arrogance. Of course the links are there; can’t you see them?
3) Cosslett claims to reject clichéd notions about pets being substitutes for children, then goes right along with them by presenting Mackerel as an object of mothering (“there is something about looking after her that has prodded the carer in me awake”) and setting up a parallel between her decision to adopt the kitten and her decision to have a child. “Though I had all these very valid reasons not to get a cat, I still wanted one,” she writes early on. And towards the end, even after she’s considered all the ‘very valid reasons’ not to have a baby, she does anyway. “I need to find another way of framing it, if I am to do it,” she says. So she decides that it’s an expression of bravery, proof of overcoming trauma. I was unconvinced. When people accuse memoirists of being navel-gazing, this is just the sort of book they have in mind. I wonder if those familiar with her Guardian journalism would agree. (Public library)
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk (2001)
When this was first published, Cusk was vilified for “hating” her child – that is, for writing honestly about the bewilderment and misery of early motherhood. We’ve moved on since then. Now women are allowed to admit that it’s not all cherubs and lullabies. I suspect what people objected to was the unemotional tone: Cusk writes like an anthropologist arriving in a new land. The style is similar to her novels’ in that she can seem detached because of her dry wit, elevated diction and frequent literary allusions.
I understand that crying, being the baby’s only means of communication, has any number of causes, which it falls to me, as her chief companion and link to the world, to interpret.
Have you taken her to toddler group, the health visitor enquired. I had not. Like vaccinations and mother and baby clinics, the notion instilled in me a deep administrative terror.
We [new parents] are heroic and cruel, authoritative and then servile, cleaving to our guesses and inspirations and bizarre rituals in the absence of any real understanding of what we are doing or how it should properly be done.
She approaches mumsy things as an outsider, clinging to intellectualism even though it doesn’t seem to apply to this new world of bodily obligation, “the rambling dream of feeding and crying that my life has become.” By the end of the book, she does express love for and attachment to her daughter, built up over time and through constant presence. But she doesn’t downplay how difficult it was. “For the first year of her life work and love were bound together, fiercely, painfully.” This is a classic of motherhood literature, and more engaging than anything else I’ve read by Cusk. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
There’s a great variety of subject matter and tone here, despite the apparently narrow theme. There are poems about pregnancy (“I have a comfort house inside my body” by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi), childbirth (“The Tempest” by Melinda Kallismae) and new motherhood, but also pieces imagining the babies that never were (“Daughters” by Catherine Smith) or revealing the complicated feelings adults have towards their mothers.
“All My Mad Mothers” by Jacqueline Saphra depicts a difficult bond through absurdist metaphors: “My mother was so hard to grasp: once we found her in a bath / of olive oil, or was it sesame, her skin well-slicked / … / to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.” I also loved her evocation of a mother–daughter relationship through a rundown of a cabinet’s contents in “My Mother’s Bathroom Armoury.”
In “My Mother Moves into Adolescence,” Deborah Alma expresses exasperation at the constant queries and calls for help from someone unconfident in English. “This, then, is how you should pray” by Flora de Falbe cleverly reuses the structure of the Lord’s Prayer as she sees her mother returning to independent life and a career as her daughter prepares to leave home. “I will hold you / as you held me / my mother – / yours are the bathroom catalogues / and the whole of a glorious future.”
I connected with these perhaps more so than the poems about becoming a mother, but there are lots of strong entries and very few unmemorable ones. Even within the mothers’ testimonials, there is ambivalence: the visceral vocabulary in “Collage” by Anna Kisby is rather morbid, partway to gruesome: “You look at me // like liver looks at me, like heart. You are familiar as innards. / In strip-light I clean your first shit. I’m not sure I do it right. / It sticks to me like funeral silk. … There is a window // guillotined into the wall. I scoop you up like a clod.”
A favourite pair: “Talisman” by Anna Kirk and “Grasshopper Warbler” by Liz Berry, on facing pages, for their nature imagery. “Child, you are grape / skins stretched over fishbones. … You are crab claws unfurling into cabbage leaves,” Kirk writes. Berry likens pregnancy to patient waiting for an elusive bird by a reedbed. (Free copy – newsletter giveaway)
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (2018)
I first read this nearly six years ago (see my original review), when I was 34; I’m now 40 and pretty much decided against having children, but FOMO is a lingering niggle. Even though I already owned it in hardback, I couldn’t resist picking up a nearly new paperback I saw going for 50 pence in a charity shop, if only for the Leanne Shapton cover – her simple, elegant watercolour style is instantly recognizable. Having a different copy also provided some novelty for my reread, which is ongoing; I’m about 80 pages from the end.
I’m not finding Heti’s autofiction musings quite as profound this time around, and I can’t deny that the book is starting to feel repetitive, but I’ve still marked more than a dozen passages. Pondering whether to have children is only part of the enquiry into what a woman artist’s life should be. The intergenerational setup stands out to me again as Heti compares her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s short life with her mother’s practical career and her own creative one.
For the past month or so, I’ve also been reading Alphabetical Diaries, so you could say that I’m pretty Heti-ed out right now, but I do so admire her for writing exactly what she wants to and sticking to no one else’s template. People probably react against Heti’s work as self-indulgent in the same way I did with Cosslett’s, but the former’s shtick works for me. (Secondhand purchase – Bas Books & Home, Newbury)
A few of the passages that have most struck me on this second reading:
I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture.
I don’t want ‘not a mother’ to be part of who I am—for my identity to be the negative of someone else’s positive identity.
The whole world needs to be mothered. I don’t need to invent a brand new life to give the warming effect to my life I imagine mothering will bring.
I have to think, If I wanted a kid, I already would have had one by now—or at least I would have tried.
Jungle House by Julianne Pachico (2023)
{BEWARE SPOILERS}
Pachico’s third novel is closer to sci-fi than I might have expected. Apart from Lena, the protagonist, all the major characters are machines or digital recreations: AI, droids, a drone, or a holograph of the consciousness of a dead girl. “Mother” is the AI security system that controls Jungle House, the Morel family’s vacation home in a country that resembles Colombia, where Pachico grew up and set her first two books. Lena, as the human caretaker, is forever grateful to Mother for rescuing her as a baby after the violent death of her parents, who were presumed rebels.
Mother is exacting but mercurial, strict about cleanliness yet apt to forget or overlook things during one of her “spells.” Lena pushes the boundaries of her independence, believing that Mother only wants to protect her but still longing to explore the degraded wilderness beyond the compound.
Mother was right, because Mother was always right about these kinds of things. The world was a complicated place, and Mother understood it much better than she did.
In the house, there was no privacy. In the house, Mother saw all.
Mother was Lena’s world. And Lena, in turn, was hers. No matter how angry they got at each other, no matter how much they fought, no matter the things that Mother did or didn’t do … they had each other.
It takes a while to work out just how tech-reliant this scenario is, what the repeated references to “the pit bull” are about, and how Lena emulated and resented Isabella, the Morel daughter, in equal measure. Even creepier than the satellites’ plan to digitize humans is the fact that Isabella’s security drone, Anton, can fabricate recorded memories. This reminded me a lot of Klara and the Sun. Tech themes aren’t my favourite, but I ultimately thought of this as an allegory of life with a narcissistic mother and the child’s essential task of breaking free. It’s not clinical and contrived, though; it’s a taut, subtle thriller with an evocative setting. (Public library)
See also: “Three on a Theme: Matrescence Memoirs”
Does one or more of these books take your fancy?
Carol Shields Prize Reading: Coleman Hill and Between Two Moons
Two last Carol Shields Prize nominees today: from the shortlist, a gorgeous tapestry of African-American family history; and, from the longlist, a likable debut novel about Muslim twin sisters navigating the febrile summer of their high school graduation in Brooklyn.
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
Is this family memoir or autofiction? I’ve shelved it as both on Goodreads; it’s a blend, one for which Foote borrows the term that Audre Lorde coined for Zami, “biomythography.” Like Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward and Jacqueline Woodson, Foote draws on personal stories but also invokes overarching narratives of Black migration and struggle. The result is magisterial, a debut novel that feels like oral history and a family scrapbook rolled into one.
During the First World War, the Coleman family were part of a mass exodus from the segregated South to the industrialized North. They hoped for a better life in New Jersey than they’d had under slavery and sharecropping in Alabama and Florida, but in fact many of the author’s ancestors became mired in ill-paid service roles (cleaner, maid, refuse collector) and, ironically, ended up having fewer opportunities for advancement than relatives who stayed behind and enrolled in Black educational institutions in the South.
Like a linked short story collection, the book pulls together 15 vignettes stretching from 1916 to 1989 and told in different styles and voices, including AAVE – I’m reliably informed that the audiobook is wonderful for that reason. A prologue in the first-person plural introduces the women who would become family matriarchs: “We wanted to go to school but couldn’t. The walk was too long. We was needed at home to plant and harvest. And boys could get more outta schooling, folks said, so it was our brothers who went.”
Other sections alternate first and third person. I especially admired the use of the second person for passages from the perspective of Celia Coleman, who develops a dependence on Four Roses whisky after being widowed. An interlude gives two poems from the point-of-view of cotton – crop failure was partly responsible for the initial relocation. There are also black-and-white photographs heading each chapter, and a family tree at the start. When I first heard about this book through its longlisting, the idea of family history told by nine characters sounded overwhelming (and potentially worthy). But the voices are so distinct that there is never a danger of getting lost, and the scenes are so vivid that you cringe from the beatings and cheer when a woman stands up to her meddling mother-in-law. There are echoes and reversals across the generations, as alcoholism and domestic abuse recur.
The core story is about Celia’s nastiness and resistance to her son Jeb’s marriage to Bertha Grimes. Bertha, battered by Jebbie and Celia alike, escapes to a brothel where she works as a cleaner. Celia ends up raising their children, along with another set of grandchildren, earning the nickname “Gra’ Coleman” and a reputation for meanness. (One excellent stand-alone story about the younger generation is titled “How to Kill Gra’ Coleman and Live to Tell About It (c. 1950).”) The inherited trauma is clear, yet I never found the content as bleak here as in A Council of Dolls; Foote weaves in enough counterbalancing lightness and love. There are so many strong female characters – Jeb’s older sisters, Bertha’s younger ones; their daughters – and plenty of humour and spirit despite the sometimes distressing subject matter. The family home, and the objects hoarded there, also play a major role.
It’s difficult to suggest the scope, as large and various as any American family’s history. An author’s note at the end details Foote’s approach – somewhere between “channeling spirits” and fictionalizing – to a novel that was many years in the gestation. I’d particularly recommend Coleman Hill to fans of Ayana Mathis and Toni Morrison. For me, there’s no contest; this should win the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 
With thanks to publicist Nicole Magas and SJP Lit (Zando) for the free e-copy for review.
Longlisted:
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad
This debut novel is cleverly set within the month of Ramadan, a time of abstention. In this way, Gawad emphasizes the tension between faith and the temptations of alcohol and sex. Egyptian-American twin sisters Amira and Lina Emam are on the cusp, about to graduate from high school and go their separate ways. Lina wants to be a model and is dating a nightclub manager she hopes can make this a reality; Amira, ever the sensible one, is college-bound. But then she meets her first boyfriend, Faraj, and lets Lina drag her into a reckless partying lifestyle. “I was seized with that summertime desire of girls: to push my body to its limits.” Meanwhile, the girls’ older brother, Sami, just home from prison, is finding it a challenge to integrate back into the family and their Bay Ridge mosque, reeling from a raid on a Muslim-owned neighbourhood business and a senseless attack on the old imam.
I feared that a tired terrorism plot would surface and was relieved when this wasn’t the case, although there is a passionate message about the injustice of police surveillance of Muslim communities. I agree with Laura (see her review) that it does at times feel like an adult is producing YA fiction. It’s proficiently written and I enjoyed getting a glimpse into an unfamiliar world, but the novel never truly sparked into life for me. It also commits one of my pet peeves: inserting third-person segments to fill in events that the narrator could not have witnessed (while referring to the other characters as “the mother,” “the boy,” or “the other girl”). One to put on high school curricula but not on a prize list. 
With thanks to Laura for passing on her copy.
And a DNF:
You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy – I read the first 22% of this short fiction collection, which equated to a brief opener in the second person about a situation of abuse, followed by part of one endless-feeling story based around one apartment and bodega and featuring two young female family friends, one of whom accepts sexual favours in the supply closet from most male visitors. The voice and prose didn’t grab me, but of course I can’t say whether later stories would have been more to my taste. (Edelweiss)
Overall thoughts and prediction:
I’m grateful for the chance to have read most of the Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, thanks to the library, Edelweiss, and especially the publicist providing multiple books in digital format straight from the publishers. I’ve been introduced to a number of books and authors I might never have otherwise come across, and my reactions to what I expected to love or to dislike sometimes surprised me. It was also fun to do a few as buddy reads with Laura.
Here’s a recap of what I read, from favourite to least favourite:
Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote – see above
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (read last year)
Dances by Nicole Cuffy
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese
The Future by Catherine Leroux
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad – see above
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan (a skim)
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power
You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy (DNF) – see above
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (skimmed last year)
Loot by Tania James (skim/DNF)
Thus, my ideal shortlist would have been the top five: Coleman Hill, Land of Milk and Honey, Cocktail, I Have Some Questions for You, and Dances.
It’s impossible to predict what the judges will pick from the actual shortlist. I never even attempted one of the finalists (A History of Burning by Janika Oza – Marcie’s comments made me confident it wouldn’t be for me) and only skimmed two others (Catton and Ganeshananthan). Sod’s law would suggest that one of those few will therefore win! I could see the case for any of the five, anyway. But I will have my fingers crossed for Coleman Hill.
The winner will be announced on Monday, 13 May.
Will you seek out something from the shortlist (or longlist)?
Buddy Reads: Kilmeny of the Orchard by L.M. Montgomery & The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble
Buddy reading and other coordinated challenges are a good excuse to read the sort of books one doesn’t always get to, especially the more obscure classics. This was my third Lucy Maud Montgomery novel within a year and a bit, and my first contribution to Ali’s ongoing year with Margaret Drabble.
{SPOILERS IN BOTH OF THE FOLLOWING REVIEWS}
Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery (1910)
I’ve participated in Canadian bloggers Naomi of Consumed by Ink and Sarah Emsley’s readalongs of three Montgomery works now. The previous two were Jane of Lantern Hill and The Story Girl. This sweet but rather outdated novella reminded me more of the latter (no surprise as it was published just a year before it) because of the overall sense of lightness and the male perspective, which isn’t what those familiar with the Anne and Emily books might expect from Montgomery.
Eric Marshall travels to Prince Edward Island one May to be the temporary schoolmaster in Lindsay, filling in for an ill friend. At his graduation from Queenslea College, his cousin David Baker had teased him about his apparent disinterest in girls. He arrives on the island to an early summer idyll and soon wanders into an orchard where a beautiful young woman is playing a violin.
This is, of course, Kilmeny Gordon, her first name from a Scottish ballad by James Hogg, and it’s clear she will be the love interest. However, there are a couple of impediments to the romance. One is resistance from Kilmeny’s guardians, the strict aunt and uncle who have cared for her since her wronged mother’s death. But the greater obstacle is Kilmeny’s background – illegitimacy plus a disability that everyone bar Eric views as insuperable: she is mute (or, as the book has it, “dumb”). She hears and understands perfectly well, but communicates via writing on a slate.
There is interesting speculation as to whether her condition is psychological or magically inherited from her late mother, who had taken a vow of silence. Conveniently, cousin David is a doctor specializing in throat and voice problems, so assures Eric and the Gordons that nothing is physically preventing Kilmeny from speech. But she refuses to marry Eric until she can speak. The scene in which she fears for his life and calls out to save him is laughably contrived. The language around disability is outmoded. It’s also uncomfortable that the story’s villain, an adopted Gordon cousin, is characterized only by his Italian heritage.
Like The Story Girl, I found this fairly twee, with an unfortunate focus on beauty (“‘Kilmeny’s mouth is like a love-song made incarnate in sweet flesh,’ said Eric enthusiastically”), and marriage as the goal of life. But it was still a pleasant read, especially for the descriptions of a Canadian spring. (Downloaded from Project Gutenberg) #ReadingKilmeny
The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble (1969)
This was Drabble’s fourth novel; I’ve read the previous three and preferred two of them to this (A Summer Bird-Cage is fab). The setup is similar to The Garrick Year, which I read last year for book club, in that the focus is on a young mother of two who embarks on an affair. When we meet Jane Gray she is awaiting the birth of her second child. Her husband, Malcolm, walked out a few weeks ago, but she has the midwife and her cousin Lucy to rely on. Lucy and her husband, James, trade off staying over with Jane as she recovers from childbirth. James is particularly solicitous and, one night, joins Jane in bed.
At this point there is a stark shift from third person to first person as Jane confesses that she’s been glossing over the complexities of the situation; sleeping with one’s cousin’s husband is never going to be without emotional fallout. “It won’t, of course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place”; “Lies, lies, it’s all lies. A pack of lies.” The novel continues to alternate between first and third person as Jane gives us glimpses into her uneasy family-making. I found myself bored through much of it, only perking back up for the meta stuff and the one climactic event. In a way it’s a classic tale of free will versus fate, including the choice of how to frame what happens.
I am no longer capable of inaction – then I will invent a morality that condones me.
It wasn’t so, it wasn’t so. I am getting tired of all this Freudian family nexus, I want to get back to that schizoid third-person dialogue.
The narrative tale. The narrative explanation. That was it, or some of it. I loved James because he was what I had never had: because he drove too fast: because he belonged to my cousin: because he was kind to his own child
(What intriguing punctuation there!) The fast driving and obsession with cars is unsubtle foreshadowing: James nearly dies in a car accident on the way to the ferry to Norway. Jane and her children, Laurie and baby Bianca, are in the car but unhurt. This was the days when seatbelts weren’t required, apparently. “It would have been so much simpler if he had been dead: so natural a conclusion, so poetic in its justice.” The Garrick Year, too, has a near-tragedy involving a car. Like many an adultery story, both novels ask whether an affair changes everything, or nothing. Infidelity and the parenting of young children together don’t amount to the most scintillating material, but it is appealing to see Drabble experimenting with how to tell a story. See also Ali’s review. (Secondhand – Alnwick charity shopping)
April Releases by Brownrigg, Ernaux, O’Connor, Waterman and Wood
Family history is a common element for the first four of these review books: a multi-generational story (incorporating autofiction in places) about Anglo-American writers and the legacy of suicide; a brief slice of memoir about the loss of a mother; a historical novella inspired by family stories and set on an island at the cusp of war; and a poetry collection drawing on a father’s death as well as on local folklore. Addiction and dementia are specific links between pairs. And to round off, a set of short stories about pregnancy and motherhood.
The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found by Sylvia Brownrigg
“The dead don’t come back, but they are not as far away as you think.”
I knew Brownrigg’s name as a novelist thanks to Susan’s blog (see her review of Pages for Her), but when I read about this family memoir it piqued my interest more than her fiction might have. The Brownrigg clan are nobility (really – her brother has the title “Baronet”) but have rejected conventional Englishness over the past century. First her grandfather, Gawen, separated from his wife and moved to Nairobi to work as a journalist. He also published two obscure novels before dying at age 27. The empty bottle of Nembutal and recent changes to his will suggested suicide, though his mother resisted the notion vociferously. Gawen’s son, Nicholas, was raised in California by his mother, Lucia, and became an alcoholic who lived off-grid on a ranch and had an unpublished Beats-influenced novel.
After Nicholas’s death in 2018, Brownrigg was compelled to trace her family’s patterns of addiction and creativity. It’s a complex network of relatives and remarriages here. The family novels and letters were her primary sources, along with a scrapbook her great-grandmother Beatrice made to memorialize Gawen for Nicholas. Certain details came to seem uncanny. For instance, her grandfather’s first novel, Star Against Star, was about, of all things, a doomed lesbian romance – and when Brownrigg first read it, at 21, she had a girlfriend.
Along with the more traditional memoir sections, there are the documents that speak for themselves and extended passages of autofiction. I loved an imaginary letter by Gawen’s older brother, who died in young childhood, and a third-person segment about Beatrice’s life in England during the Second World War. But I mostly skipped over the 90 lightly fictionalized pages about the author’s (“Sophie’s”) life with her father in California. You might view this as a showcase of possible methods for engaging with family history, some of which work better than others. All of it is fascinating material, though.
Published by Counterpoint in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux (1988; 2024)
[Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie]
This memoir of Ernaux’s mother’s life and death is, at 58 pages, little more than an extended (auto)biographical essay. Confusingly, it covers the same period she wrote about in I Remain in Darkness (originally published nine years later), a diary of her mother’s final years with dementia; I even remembered two specific events and quotes. Why not combine the two into a full-length biographical recollection? Or pair it with A Man’s Place, Ernaux’s memoir of her father, in one volume? Perhaps her works will be repackaged in the future. But this came first: Ernaux started writing just a couple of weeks after her mother’s death, and spent 10 months over it. It’s clear she was determined to salvage what she could of her mother’s life:
It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time … This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only by words. … I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.
Ernaux opens with news of the death, and the funeral. But soon she’s pushing back into the past. Her mother grew up in poverty near Rouen and worked in a factory before her marriage, when she and her husband took on a grocery store and café. The Second World War was in some romantic way the great drama of her life. She was exacting of her daughter: “Her overriding concern was to give me everything she hadn’t had. But this involved so much work, so much worrying about money”. In her widowhood she came to live with Ernaux, who was then divorced with two sons, and tried to find a middle way between independence and connection. Eventually, though, her memory loss required admission to a nursing home.
I’ve felt the same about all three short works I’ve read by Ernaux so far: though precisely observed, they conceal themselves behind emotional distance. So while this might seem similar to A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, I found the latter more engaging.
With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor
The remote Welsh island setting of O’Connor’s debut novella was inspired by several real-life islands that were depopulated in the twentieth century due to a change in climate and ways of life: Bardsey, St Kilda, the Blasket Islands, and the Aran Islands. (A letter accompanying my review copy explained that the author’s grandmother was a Welsh speaker from North Wales and her Irish grandfather had relatives on the Blasket Islands.)
Eighteen-year-old Manod Llan is the older daughter of a lobster fisherman. Her sweetheart recently left to find work in a mainland factory. It’s 1938 and there are vague rumbles about war, but more pressing is the arrival of strangers here to study a vanishing culture. Anthropologists Edward and Joan learn snatches of Welsh and make recordings of local legends and songs, which are interspersed with the fragmentary narrative. Manod, star-struck, seeks the English researchers’ approval as she helps with translation and other secretarial duties, but becomes disillusioned with their misinterpretations and fascist leanings.
The gradual disintegration of a beached whale casts a metaphorical shadow of decay over the slow-burning story. I kept waiting for momentous events that never came. More definitive consequences? Something to do with Manod’s worries for her little sister, Llinos? A flash-forward to the abandoned island’s after-years? Or to Manod’s future? As it is, the sense of being stuck at a liminal time makes it all feel like prologue. But O’Connor’s writing is quite lovely (“The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss”; “All of my decisions felt like trying to catch a fish that did not exist until I caught it”) and the book is strong on atmosphere and tension. I’ll look out for her next work.
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman
I was most drawn to the poems in Part I, “All but Forgotten,” about his father’s last year or so.
The titles participate in telling the story: “Alcoholic Dementia,” followed by “Twin Oaks Nursing Home.”
The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches.
…
Then what you’ve turned yourself into – half there
on one side of a final single bed
you might not leave till the rest of you has left –
starts, stares through me, says ‘I’m being held
against my will!’, tells a nurse to ‘Just fuck off’
then thanks her. Old boy, when did you get like this?
The sheep-tracks of my mind are worn to trenches.
Then they moved you to a home
that still wasn’t home. ‘Why
am I in this fucking place?
Nothing’s wrong with me.’
So I’d tell you all over again,
but only the easy part (‘You’re
not remembering things well
at present.’ ‘Yes I fucking am’)
and you relearned that you’d
never learn – mindless torture,
until I stopped it. Your
silences were trains departing.
From the miscellany of Part II, I plucked out “Gooseberries” and “Perennials,” both of which conceal emotion among plants. Then Part III, “Lincolnshire Folk Tales,” turns the tone mischievous, with the ABCB end-rhymes of “Yallery Brown,” “The Metheringham Lass,” “The Lincoln Imp,” and “Nanny Rutt” (I felt I’d stumbled on a limerick with its rhythm: “Math Wood is a small plot of trees south of Bourne, / next to McDonald’s and Lidl. / It’s privately owned, full of shot-gun shells, pheasants – / but still, a bit of an idyll”). Plenty of good stuff, then, but it doesn’t all seem to fit together in the same collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Naomi Wood
I requested this because a) I had enjoyed Wood’s novels Mrs. Hemingway and The Hiding Game and b) I couldn’t resist the title. These nine contemporary stories (five in the first person and four in the third person) all feature women who are pregnant and/or mothers of young children. Three dwell on work–life balance in particular, with the female protagonists of “Lesley, in Therapy” and “Dracula at the Movies” an animator and a filmmaker, respectively. The third, “Hurt Feelings,” in which a medical emergency forces a choice between career and motherhood, was my favourite. Claudia is working on an advertising campaign for a large pharmaceutical company whose newest product targets chronic pain. Although she suspects it’s a placebo, she knows how valuable it is for these people to have their pain acknowledged given it’s as invisible as her history of pregnancy loss.
Other highlights included “Peek-a-Boo,” in which pregnant twin sisters fly to Italy to remonstrate with their father, who refuses to cede a holiday flat to the next renters; and “Wedding Day,” about a woman bitter enough to try to sabotage her ex’s big day by demanding he bring their daughter, the flower girl, home by bedtime. “Flatten the Curve” is about restrictions and desires during Covid lockdown. Family, neighbour, and co-worker dynamics fuel the drama. In a few cases, Wood imagined promising situations but didn’t deliver on them. I could hardly believe “Comorbidities,” about a mother who films a sex tape with her husband to distract from her eco-anxiety, won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. If Wood was aiming for edgy, she landed on peevish instead. “Dino Moms,” the final story, was worst, with its absurd dinosaur-vet reality-TV setup. Overall, the collection is too one-note because of the obsession with motherhood (“It is not very interesting to be in love with your child; it’s commonplace, this sacrificial love”). Back to novels soon, please.
With thanks to Phoenix (Orion) for the free copy for review.
Does one of these catch your eye? What April releases can you recommend?
Carol Shields Prize Reading: Daughter and Dances
Two more Carol Shields Prize nominees today: from the shortlist, the autofiction-esque story of a father and daughter, both writers, and their dysfunctional family; and, from the longlist, a debut novel about the physical and emotional rigours of being a Black ballet dancer.
Daughter by Claudia Dey
Like her protagonist, Mona Dean, Dey is a playwright, but the Canadian author has clearly stated that her third novel is not autofiction, even though it may feel like it. (Fragmentary sections, fluidity between past and present, a lack of speech marks; not to mention that Dey quotes Rachel Cusk and there’s even a character named Sigrid.) Mona’s father, Paul, is a serial adulterer who became famous for his novel Daughter and hasn’t matched that success in the 20 years since. He left Mona and Juliet’s mother, Natasha, for Cherry, with whom he had another daughter, Eva. There have been two more affairs. Every time Mona meets Paul for a meal or a coffee, she’s returned to a childhood sense of helplessness and conflict.
I had a sordid contract with my father. I was obsessed with my childhood. I had never gotten over my childhood. Cherry had been cruel to me as a child, and I wanted to get back at Cherry, and so I guarded my father’s secrets like a stash of weapons, waiting for the moment I could strike.
It took time for me to warm to Dey’s style, which is full of flat, declarative sentences, often overloaded with character names. The phrasing can be simple and repetitive, with overuse of comma splices. At times Mona’s unemotional affect seems to be at odds with the melodrama of what she’s recounting: an abortion, a rape, a stillbirth, etc. I twigged to what Dey was going for here when I realized the two major influences were Hemingway and Shakespeare.
Mona’s breakthrough play is Margot, based on the life of one Hemingway granddaughter, and she’s working on a sequel about another. There are four women in Paul’s life, and Mona once says of him during a period of writer’s block, “He could not write one true sentence.” So Paul (along with Mona, along with Dey) may be emulating Hemingway.
And then there’s the King Lear setup. (I caught on to this late, perhaps because I was also reading a more overt Lear update at the time, Private Rites by Julia Armfield.) The larger-than-life father; the two older daughters and younger half-sister; the resentment and estrangement. Dey makes the parallel explicit when Mona, musing on her Hemingway-inspired oeuvre, asks, “Why had Shakespeare not called the play King Lear’s Daughters?”
Were it not for this intertextuality, it would be a much less interesting book. And, to be honest, the style was not my favourite. There were some lines that really irked me (“The flowers they were considering were flamboyant to her eye, she wanted less flamboyant flowers”; “Antoine barked. He was barking.”; “Outside, it sunned. Outside, it hailed.”). However, rather like Sally Rooney, Dey has prioritized straightforward readability. I found that I read this quickly, almost as if in a trance, inexorably drawn into this family’s drama. 
Related reads: Monsters by Claire Dederer, The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood
With thanks to publicist Nicole Magas and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the free e-copy for review.
Also from the shortlist:
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan – The only novel that is on both the CSP and Women’s Prize shortlists. I dutifully borrowed a copy from the library, but the combination of the heavy subject matter (Sri Lanka’s civil war and the Tamil Tigers resistance movement) and the very small type in the UK hardback quickly defeated me, even though I was enjoying Sashi’s quietly resolute voice and her medical training to work in a field hospital. I gave it a brief skim. The author researched this second novel for 20 years, and her narrator is determined to make readers grasp what went on: “You must understand: that word, terrorist, is too simple for the history we have lived … You must understand: There is no single day on which a war begins.” I know from Laura and Marcie that this is top-class historical fiction, never mawkish or worthy, so I may well try it some other time when I have the fortitude.
Longlisted:
Dances by Nicole Cuffy
This was a buddy read with Laura (see her review); I think we both would have liked to see it on the shortlist as, though we’re not dancers ourselves, we’re attracted to the artistry and physicality of ballet. It’s always a privilege to get an inside glimpse of a rarefied world, and to see people at work, especially in a field that requires single-mindedness and self-discipline. Cuffy’s debut novel focuses on 22-year-old Celine Cordell, who becomes the first Black female principal in the New York City Ballet. Cece marvels at the distance between her Brooklyn upbringing – a single mother and drug-dealing older brother, Paul – and her new identity as a celebrity who has brand endorsements and gets stopped on the street for selfies.
Even though Kaz, the director, insists that “Dance has no race,” Cece knows it’s not true. (And Kaz in some ways exaggerates her difference, creating a role for her in a ballet based around Gullah folklore from South Carolina.) Cece has always had to work harder than the others in the company to be accepted:
Ballet has always been about the body. The white body, specifically. So they watched my Black body, waited for it to confirm their prejudices, grew ever more anxious as it failed to do so, again and again.
A further complication is her relationship with Jasper, her white dance partner. It’s an open secret in the company that they’re together, but to the press they remain coy. Cece’s friends Irine and Ryn support her through rocky times, and her former teachers, Luca and Galina, are steadfast in their encouragement. Late on, Cece’s search for Paul, who has been missing for five years, becomes a surprisingly major element. While the sibling bond helps the novel stand out, I most enjoyed the descriptions of dancing. All of the sections and chapters are titled after ballet terms, and even when I was unfamiliar with the vocabulary or the music being referenced, I could at least vaguely picture all the moves in my head. It takes real skill to render other art forms in words. I’ll look forward to following Cuffy’s career. 
With thanks to publicist Nicole Magas and One World for the free e-copy for review.
Currently reading:
(Shortlist) Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote
(Longlist) Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad
Up next:
(Longlist) You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy
I’m aiming for one more batch of reviews (and a prediction) before the winner is announced on 13 May.
Rereading Of Mice and Men for #1937Club
A year club hosted by Karen and Simon is always a great excuse to read more classics. Between my shelves and the library, I had six options for 1937. But I started reading too late, and had too many books on the go, to finish more than one – a reread. No matter; it was a good one I was glad to revisit, and I’ll continue with the other reread at my own pace.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Are teenagers doomed to dislike the books they read in school? I think this must have been on the curriculum for 11th grade English. It was my third Steinbeck novella after The Red Pony and The Pearl, so to me it confirmed that he wrote contrived, depressing stuff with lots of human and animal suffering. Not until I read The Grapes of Wrath in college and East of Eden (THE Great American Novel) five years ago did I truly recognize Steinbeck’s greatness.
George and Lennie are itinerant farm workers in Salinas Valley, California. Lennie is a gentle giant, intellectually disabled and aware of his own strength when hauling sacks of barley but not when stroking mice and puppies. George looks after Lennie as a favour to Aunt Clara and they’re saving up to buy their own smallholding. This dream is repeated to the point of legend, somewhere between a bedtime story and scripture:
‘Someday—we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and—’ ‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’,’ Lennie shouted. ‘And have rabbits.’
They quickly settle in alongside the other ranch-hands and even convert two to their idyllic picture of independence. But the foreman, Curley, is a hothead and his bored would-be-starlet wife won’t stop roaming into the men’s quarters. No matter how much George tells Lennie to stay away from both of them, something is set in motion – an inevitable repeat of an incident from their previous employment that forced them to move on.
I remembered the main contours here but not the ultimate ending, and this time I appreciated the deliberate echoes and heavy foreshadowing (all that symbolism to write formulaic school essays about!): this is Shakespearean tragedy with the signs and stakes writ large against a limited background. Bar some paragraphs of scene-setting descriptions, it is like a play; no surprise it’s been filmed several times. (I wish I didn’t have danged John Malkovich in my head as Lennie; I can’t think of anyone else in that role, whereas Gary Sinise doesn’t necessarily epitomize George for me.) The characterization of the one Black character, Crooks, and the one woman are uncomfortably of their time. However, Crooks is given the dubious honour of conveying the bleak vision: “Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.” Like Hardy, Steinbeck knows what happens when the lower classes make the mistake of wanting too much. It’s a timeless tale of grit and desperation, the kind one can’t imagine not existing. (Public library)
Apposite listening: “The Great Defector” by Bell X1 (known for their quirky lyrics):
You’ve been teasing us farm boys
’til we start talking ’bout those rabbits, George
oh, won’t you tell us ’bout those rabbits, George?
Original rating (1999?):
My rating now:
Currently rereading: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – My father gave me this for Christmas when I was 10. I think I finally read it sometime in my later teens, about when the Lord of the Rings films were coming out. I’m on page 70 now. I’d forgotten just how funny Tolkien is about the set-in-his-ways Bilbo and his devotion to a cosy, quiet life. When he’s roped into a quest to reclaim a mountain hoard of treasure from a dragon – along with 13 dwarves and Gandalf the wizard – he realizes he has much discomfort and many a missed meal ahead of him.
DNFed: Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb – My second attempt with Hungarian literature, and I found it curiously similar to the other novel I’d read (Embers by Sandor Márai) in that much of it, at least the 50 pages I read, is a long story told by one character to another. In this case, Mihály, on his Italian honeymoon, tells his wife about his childhood best friends, a brother and sister. I wondered if I was meant to sense homoerotic attachment between Mihály and Tamás, which would appear to doom this marriage right at its outset. (Secondhand – Edinburgh charity shop, 2018)
Skimmed: Out of Africa by Karen Blixen – I enjoyed the prose style but could tell I’d need a long time to wade through the detail of her life on a coffee farm in Kenya, and would probably have to turn a blind eye to the expected racism of the anthropological observation of the natives. (Secondhand – Way’s in Henley, 2015)
Here’s hoping for a better showing next time!
(I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, and 1940 Club.)
Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields (Buddy Reread)
Marcie of Buried in Print and I have spent the first few months or so of 2024 rereading Carol Shields’s short stories: one volume per month from the Collected Stories. (Previous reviews: Various Miracles (1985) and The Orange Fish (1989).) Dressing Up for the Carnival was a late collection, published in 2000 – just a few years before the author’s death. Like Various Miracles, it’s a long book; in fact, at 22 stories, it’s the longest of the three. And, just like the other two, it opens with the title story, which is itself akin to “Various Miracles” with its pile-up of seemingly random happenings. All the examples are of how the things that people wear, or carry, create a persona. I noted pleasing symmetry in that “Dressing Up for the Carnival” opens the book, while the final story is “Dressing Down,” about a married couple divided by the husband’s devotion to naturism for one month out of each year.
I hadn’t realized that Unless, Shields’s final, Booker-shortlisted novel, arose from one of these stories: “A Scarf.” It took me just two paragraphs to figure it out, based on her narrator’s punning novel title (My Thyme Is Up). I’d also forgotten about the fun Shields pokes at literary snobbishness through her protagonist winning the Offenden Prize, which “recognizes literary quality and honors accessibility”. (There is actually a UK prize that rewards ease of reading, the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award.)
Many main characters throughout Shields’s work are artists, musicians, writers or poets. When windows are subject to an exorbitant tax, two painters decide to create their own, a joint project that brings the couple closer (in “Windows”). The elevated diction and proliferating French phrases skewer the narrator’s pretensions. Edging towards surrealism is another custom of Shields’s, seen here in “Weather,” where meteorological phenomena – or the lack thereof – are literal and a metaphor for marriage. This one finds an echo in “Stop!”, a fable about a queen who avoids all risk and change and thus disallows weather.
A number of the flash-length stories are similarly allegorical, or linguistic experiments, e.g., “Absence,” which is lipogrammatic (no “I”). “Flatties: their Various Forms and Uses” is a faux-anthropological one about flatbreads that reminded me of “Today Is the Day.” “The Harp” looks at the aftermath of the freak accident of a harp falling from the sky. “Keys” is a daisy-chain type of story (like “Home” et al.), with the keys symbolic of access, ownership, secrets, home, and more. Academia is another frequent subject for Shields. “Ilk” has the same academic jargon (“narrativity is ovarian, not ejaculatory”) and mockery of a predominantly male preserve as in “The Metaphor Is Dead–Pass It On” and “Salt.”
A topic shared with The Orange Fish is the biographer’s art. I loved “Edith-Esther,” about a biographer who becomes so obsessed with the expression of spirituality in his subject’s works that he completely skews her life story towards it, even though she tells him flat out she doesn’t believe in God. What a nightmare for an author to be so misunderstood; it’s no accident, of course, that it’s a male critic doing it to a female writer. “Invention” imagines creation scenarios for everything from steering wheel covers to daydreaming.
In “Dying for Love,” an early standout for me, three wronged women consider suicide. The vocabulary quickly alerts the reader to a change of time period after each section break. All three decide “Life is a thing to be cherished”. My three favourites, though, were the final three – all slightly cheeky with the focus on sex (and naturism). They were together an excellent way to close the volume, and the Collected Stories. In “The Next Best Kiss,” single mother Sandy meets a new paramour at a conference. She and Todd share garrulousness, and a sexual connection. But he doesn’t’ see the appeal of her biography’s subject, a Gregor Mendel-meets-John Clare type, and she is aghast to learn that he still lives with his mother.
“Eros,” set at a sexually charged dinner party (and you know from Larry’s Party that Shields is brilliant at party scenes), spools back through Ann’s erotic life, all the way to childhood ignorance and curiosity. “Everyone knew this awful secret which was everywhere suggested but which for Ann lay, still, a quarter-inch out of reach.” That Ann has lost a breast to cancer treatment made me ponder whether this story reflected Shields’s own experience – she died in 2003 of a recurrence of breast cancer.
There were a few too many second-tier stories here compared to The Orange Fish, but several gems; and I always appreciate Shields’s wordplay and insider’s satire on being an academic and/or a writer.
My original rating (c. 2008):
My rating now:
Bonus
Shields’s final short story, “Segue,” is printed first in the Collected Stories. Dutiful Marcie read it first, whereas I saved it for last to try to preserve a sense of chronological order. Max Sexton writes novels, the latest of which sounds exactly like The Corrections – a 2001 publication, and Shields also references 9/11. Jane Sexton, the narrator, writes sonnets (“little sounds”) and thinks about ageing, routine, and the transmutation of life into art. A sonnet typically involves a “turn,” which I suppose is the origin of the title. Coming to the end of her life, did Shields think of herself primarily as a poet? This line did strike me as autobiographical: “Forget you are a sixty-seven-year-old woman with a girlish white pageboy.” The Oak Park, Illinois setting inevitably reminded me of Hemingway, but Shields, too, was from Chicago. The final line captures the bittersweet nature of so much of her work: “if it weren’t for my particular circumstances I would be happy.”
Rereading Shields is a habit I plan to keep up. For my next reread, I fancy Mary Swann.
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reads: Cocktail & Land of Milk and Honey
Two final reviews in advance of tomorrow’s shortlist announcement: a sophisticated, nostalgic short story collection and an intense future-set novel full of the pleasures of the flesh. Both make it onto my wish list at the end of this post.
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
The 12 stories of this debut collection brought to mind Tessa Hadley and Alice Munro for their look back at chic or sordid 1960s–1980s scenes and dysfunctional families or faltering marriages. They’re roughly half and half first-person and third-person (five versus seven). The title story opens the book with a fantastic line: “The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough.” Later, the narrator elaborates:
Her meaning is that if people drank more, they’d loosen up. Parties would be more fun, like they used to be. And I laugh along. Yes, I say, letting her top up my glass of Chardonnay. That’s it, not enough booze. But I’m thinking about Tom Collins.
Not the drink, but an alias a party guest used when he stumbled into her bedroom looking for a toilet. She was about eleven at this point and she and her brother vaguely resented being shut away from their parents’ parties. While for readers this is an uncomfortable moment as we wonder if she’s about to be molested, in memory it’s taken on a rosy glow for her – a taste of adult composure and freedom that she has sought with every partner and every glass of booze since. This was a pretty much perfect story, with a knock-out ending to boot.
Dependence on alcohol recurs, and “Hawthorne Yellow,” is also about a not-quite affair, between a restless stay-at-home mother and the decorator who discovers antique sketches in the old servants’ quarters of her home. “Orlando, 1974” again contrasts childhood nostalgia with seedy reality: Disney World should have been an idyll, but the narrator mostly remembers a lot of vomiting. “Old Growth” and “Bear Country” have Ray renegotiating his relationship with his son after divorcing Gwyneth. “Hyacinth Girl,” too, is about complicated stepfamilies, while “Wise Men Say” looks back at cross-class romance. The protagonist of “Maeve” feels she can’t match the title character’s perfect parenting skills; the first-person plural in “Pomegranate” portrays a group of wild convent schoolgirls.
“Little Girl Lost” was the most Hadley-meets-Munro, with an alcoholic painter’s daughter seen first as a half-feral child and later as a hippie young woman. “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was the least essential with its elderly narrator piecing things together in the aftermath of a burglary. Along with the title story, the standout for me was “Bundle of Joy,” about a persnickety grandmother going to her daughter’s place to spend time with her new grandson. She disapproves of just about every decision Erin has made (leaving the dogs’ frozen turds in the backyard all winter, for instance), but her interference threatens to have lasting consequences. Not a dud in the dozen, and a very strong voice I’ll expect to read much more from. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis)
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.
A real step up from How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which I read for book club last year – while it was interesting to see the queer, BIPOC spin Zhang put on the traditional Western, I found her Booker-longlisted debut bleak and strange in such a detached way that it was hard to care about. By contrast, I was fully involved in her sensuous and speculative second novel.
A 29-year-old Chinese American chef is exiled when the USA closes its borders while she’s working in London. On a smog-covered planet where 98% of crops have failed, scarcity reigns – but there is a world apart, a mountaintop settlement at the Italian border where money can buy any ingredient desired and threatened foods are cultivated in a laboratory setting. While peasants survive on mung bean flour, wealthy backers indulge in classic French cuisine. The narrator’s job is to produce lavish, evocative multi-course meals to bring investors on board. Foie gras, oysters, fine wines; heirloom vegetables; fruits not seen for years. But also endangered creatures and mystery meat wrested back from extinction. Her employer’s 21-year-old daughter, Aida, oversees the lab where these rarities are kept alive.
Ironically, surrounded with such delicacies, the chef loses her appetite for all but cigarettes – yet another hunger takes over. Her relationship with Aida is a passionate secret made all the more peculiar by the fact that the chef’s other role is to impersonate Aida’s dead mother, Eun-Young. It’s clear this precarious setup can’t last; ambition and technology keep moving on. The novel presents such a striking picture of desire at the end of the world. Each sentence is honed to flawlessness, with whole paragraphs of fulsome descriptions of meals. Zhang’s prose reminded me of Stephanie Danler’s and R.O. Kwon’s – no surprise, then, that they’re on the Acknowledgments list, as are a cornucopia of foods and other literary influences.
I’m not usually one for a dystopian novel, but the emotional territory keeps this one grounded even as the plot grows more sinister. My only complaint is that I would have left off the final chapter as I don’t think tracing the protagonist through four more decades of life adds much. I would rather have left this world in limbo than thought of the episode as a blip in a facile regeneration process – that’s the most unrealistic element of all. But this has still been my favourite read from the longlist so far. And there’s even a faithful pet cat, a “recalcitrant beast” that keeps coming back to the chef despite benign neglect. (Public library) 
My ideal shortlist, based on what I’ve read and still want to read, would be:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
Dances by Nicole Cuffey
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
I wouldn’t be averse to seeing The Future or Chrysalis on there either. (Just not Loot, please!)
See Laura’s post for a recap of her reviews and her wish list. Marcie has also been reading from the longlist; see her first write-up here.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 