20 Books of Summer, 5: A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson
Journalist and popular historian Juliet Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West’s granddaughter and one of the few remaining guardians of her living memory. This 2015 family memoir chronicles the lives of seven (eight, really) generations of women and travels from Malaga in the 1830s to present-day England. Nicolson acknowledges the inherited privilege that has typified this clan since the time of Vita’s grandmother but prefers to emphasize the roles that place and talent have played. It is enough of a biography of Vita to have won a Bisexual Book Award but, even though Vita only had sons, the focus is on mother–daughter bonds and how values and experiences have recurred across nearly two centuries.
First came Pepita, who rose from poverty in southern Spain to be a legendary dancer (“the Beyoncé of her day,” Nicolson quipped at an online event I attended – see below) and catch the eye of an English diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, at a performance in Paris. Although Pepita was already married to her dancing teacher, she shook off her controlling mother and became Sackville-West’s longtime mistress, bearing him seven children. They could all have been disinherited for illegitimacy, however, had Pepita’s daughter Victoria not secured the link – and access to the family estate, Knole – by marrying her cousin, young Lionel Sackville-West. Vita wrote in Pepita, her joint biography of her mother and grandmother, “My mother appears to have been born with the faculty of attracting the most peculiar and improbable happenings,” such as a proposal of marriage from the recently widowed U.S. president, Chester Arthur, when she accompanied her father to Washington, DC.
Vita is the book’s presiding spirit and pivot point, but I already knew a lot about her from reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography plus two of her novels, so this material was too familiar. The fact that we then leap from daughters to a daughter-in-law (Nicolson’s mother, Philippa Tennyson-d’Eyncourt – these figures are all posher than posh!) is unfortunate as it dilutes the theme. However, Nicolson gives a behind-the-scenes look at Sissinghurst and the marriages between Vita and Harold, loving but also a cover for same-sex relationships for both of them; and Nigel and Philippa, which was a disaster almost from the start. Nicolson is also brave to admit the alcoholism that she subconsciously received from her mother. Philippa died at 58, but by admitting she had a problem Nicolson was able to get help and turn things around. Two generations followed: her two daughters and one granddaughter, who is now 11.
Nicolson sees patterns repeating across the generations: emotional abandonment by parents, “the lack of confidence, the fear of failure, and the seeking of approval where there was none” as well as “writing about the life and work of an earlier generation.” She hopes that with this book she has marked the arrival of “an increasingly tolerant and accepting generation, one that is not afraid to learn from the mistakes of the past and is determined not to repeat them”. (Fun but unrelated fact: Penelope Fitzgerald was one of Nicolson’s teachers.)
On the staircase leading up to Vita’s study in the tower, September 2009.
I visited Sissinghurst in 2009 – I can’t believe I haven’t been back in the past 15 years – and when we briefly lived in Sevenoaks in 2012 we also went to Knole. Both are magical places, especially Sissinghurst. For a few years there I was on a kick of reading a lot by and about Vita (I can recommend No Signposts in the Sea) and I also absorbed a fair bit via Adam Nicolson’s books (that’s Juliet’s brother) and his wife Sarah Raven’s – her recipes are to die for, and she’s kept up the gardens in a way that would make Vita proud. So I’d say it probably helps to have an existing interest in the family, but it should be a reasonably engrossing read in any case. (Free from a neighbour) 
Yesterday I watched “The Inspiration of Vita Sackville-West,” a recording of an RSL event held at the London Library in October that was aired to tie in with their annual Dalloway Day as well as the 95th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (for which Vita was a model) and, of course, Pride Month. The panelists were Juliet Nicolson; trans novelist Shola von Reinhold, whose LOTE (2020) won the Republic of Consciousness and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes; fashion critic Charlie Porter; and writer Olivia Laing. The discussion was expertly chaired by Shahidha Bari, an academic, fashion writer and presenter of BBC Two’s Inside Culture. She opened by asking each speaker to define Vita in one word. Nicolson chose “lover,” which von Reinhold echoed. Porter said “physical.” Laing cheated with a made-up compound word: “androgynous-aristocratic-aesthete.”
And the conversation went on from there. Nicolson spoke of her grandmother as a formidable woman, tall and tobacco-scented, and remembered the exotic treasures she and her siblings found in Vita’s tower study, such as a bottle of emerald-green nail polish. She described Vita as enigmatic and representing duality: she was born a Victorian but has been embraced by modernist and queer studies; she was conventional in some ways, but also a rebel. Porter has written about fashion and the Bloomsbury circle, with Woolf as one of his subjects, so he thinks about Vita mostly as a muse. He read from Vita’s letter to Harold describing meeting Woolf, whom she thought “quite old” and “atrociously dressed.” Nonetheless, she’d lost her heart. Woolf in her turn commented on Vita’s moustache, which was likely a sign of her Spanish heritage rather than excess testosterone as some have theorized.
For von Reinhold, Vita is an early example of androgyny, a precursor to today’s trans and nonbinary identities. Laing, who has recently published a book on gardening, focused on Vita as a garden writer and designer. She said she doesn’t really value Vita’s novels but thinks her garden books (collections of her Observer columns) are extraordinary and read a passage in which she dreamt up the famous White Garden she would create at Sissinghurst (I read a kinda crummy novel about it a few years ago, The White Garden by Stephanie Barron).
The event gave a very good sense of Vita as a person but not as a writer. Audience questions brought up her poetry (oh God, it’s awful!) and travel books but that was as far as it went, and there was no discussion of the novels. Nicolson mentioned Pepita in passing but mostly talked about Portrait of a Marriage, which was half written by Vita and then finished by Nigel, a publisher (he was half of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, aka W&N). He had the courage to reveal his mother’s sexuality and Nicolson said that she believes Vita’s legacy is courage – to create a garden from scratch as a self-taught amateur, yes; but mostly to be oneself.
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?
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)?
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 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.
Carol Shields Prize Longlist: A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power
my doll is a collector of tragedy … the device I use to hide from something I already know
Mona Susan Power’s fourth novel, A Council of Dolls, is an Indigenous saga that draws on her own family history. Through first-person narratives by three generations of Dakhóta and Lakhóta women, she explores the ongoing effects of trauma resulting from colonialist oppression. The journey into the past begins with Sissy, a little girl in racist 1960s Chicago with an angry, physically abusive mother, Lillian. This section sets up the book’s pattern of ascribing voice and agency to characters’ dolls. Specifically, Sissy dissociates from her own emotions and upsetting experiences by putting them onto Ethel, her Black doll. Power relies on the dramatic irony between Sissy’s childhood perspective and readers’ understanding.
Moving backward: In 1930s North Dakota, we see Lillian coping with her father’s alcohol-fuelled violence by pretending she is being directed in a play. She loses her Shirley Temple doll, Mae, in an act of charity towards a sickly girl in the community. Lillian and her sister, Blanche, attend an Indian school in Bismarck. Run by nuns, it’s even crueller than the institution their parents, Cora and Jack, attended: the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (also a setting in Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange). Cora’s beautifully introspective journal from the 1910s reveals the systematic cultural annihilation that took place there. Her doll, Winona, rescued from a massacre in the time of Sitting Bull, was on the pyre of precious belongings – tribal costumes, instruments, medals, sacred feathers – burned on students’ arrival. But her stone heart survives as a totem of resilience.
This is a powerful but harrowing story. The characterization and narration are strong, and the nesting-dolls structure means we get glimpses into the future for all three protagonists. However, I was disappointed by a number of Power’s decisions. It appeared that a fourth and final narrator close to the present day would introduce another aspect, but in fact Jesse is a new name that Sissy chose for herself. Now a 50-year-old academic and writer, she becomes a medium for the dolls’ accounts – but this ends up repeating material we’d already encountered. The personification of familial tragedy in the figure of “the injured woman” who appears to Cora verges on mawkish, and the touches of magic realism to do with the dolls sit uneasily beside clinical discussions of trauma. In Jesse’s section, there is something unsubtle about how this forms the basis of a conversation between her and her friend Izzy:
(Jesse thinks) “I wanted that chance to break the chain of passing on harmful inner scripts, the self-loathing that comes from brutally effective colonization.”
(Izzy says) “whoo, that’s a big fat pipe full of misery … Our people have been pathologized from the very beginning. Still are.”
It’s possible I would have responded to this with more enthusiasm had it been packaged as a family memoir. As it is, I was unsure about the hybridization of autofiction and magic realism and wondered what white readers coming to the novel should conclude. I kept in mind Elaine Castillo’s essay “How to Read Now,” about her sense of BIPOC writers’ job: “if our stories primarily serve to educate, console and productively scold a comfortable white readership, then those stories will have failed their readers”. Perhaps Power’s novel was not primarily intended to serve in that way.
I’ll let her have the last word, via the Author’s Note: “outrageously prejudiced depictions of my ancestors and our people are one reason I became a writer. From childhood I felt an urgent need to speak my truth, which was long suppressed. Writing this book was a healing endeavor. May it support the healing of others.”
With thanks to publicist Nicole Magas and Mariner Books for the free e-copy for review.
This was a buddy read with Laura; see her review here.
Before the shortlist is announced on 9 April, I plan to review my two current reads, Cocktail by Lisa Alward and Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, and concoct a personal wish list.
March Releases by Akbar, Bosker, García Márquez, and Wrenn
I’m catching up after a busy end to last month. Today I have an uneven debut novel from a poet whose work I’ve enjoyed before, a journalist’s jaunty submersion in the world of modern art, a posthumous novella from a famous Colombian author I’d not previously read, and a (literally) trippy memoir about C-PTSD, coral, climate breakdown, queerness and more. I can pinpoint a couple of elements that some or all of them have in common: beauty (whether in art or in nature) and dead mothers.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
I’d read the Iranian American poet’s two full-length collections and particularly admired Pilgrim Bell, one of my favourite books of 2021. That was enough for me to put this on my Most Anticipated list for 2024, even though based on the synopsis I wrote: “His debut novel sounds kind of unhinged, but I figure it’s worth a try.” Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb: “When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his [late] mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.”
Cyrus Shams is an Iranian American aspiring poet who grew up in Indiana with a single father, his mother Roya having died in a passenger aircraft mistakenly shot down by a U.S. Navy missile cruiser (this really happened: Iran Air Flight 655, on 3 July 1988). He continues to lurk around the Keady University campus, working as a medical actor at the hospital, but his ambition is to write. During his shaky recovery from drug and alcohol abuse, he undertakes a project that seems divinely inspired: “Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest”. By seeking the meaning in others’ deaths, he hopes his modern “Book of Martyrs” will teach him how to cherish his own life.
This document, which we see in fragments, sets up hypothetical dialogues between figures real and imaginary, dead and living, and intersperses them with poems and short musings. But when a friend tells Cyrus about the Brooklyn Museum installation “DEATH-SPEAK,” which has terminally ill Iranian artist Orkideh living out her last days in public, he spies an opportunity to move the work beyond theory and into the physical realm. So he flies to New York City with his best friend (and occasional f**kbuddy), bartender Zee Novak, and visits Orkideh every day until the installation’s/artist’s end.
This is a wildly original but unruly novel with a few problems. One: Akbar has clung too obviously to his own story and manner of speaking with Cyrus (e.g., “I honestly actually do worry about that, no joke. Being a young Iranian man making a book about martyrdom, going around talking to people about becoming a martyr. It’s not inert, you know?”). Another is that the poems, and poetic descriptions, are much the best material. The only exception might be a zany scene where Zee and Cyrus chop wood while high. But the main issue I had is that the plot turns on a twist 50 pages from the end, a huge coincidence that feels unearned. I admire the ambition Akbar had for this – a seething, open-hearted enquiry into addiction, love, suicide and queerness – but look forward to him getting back to poetry.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
I was a big fan of Bosker’s Cork Dork (2017), her deep dive into the world of fine wine. Her second book is similarly constructed and equally fun: more personal than authoritative, light yet substantial, and accessible to the uninitiated as well as those with an existing interest in the subject. She begins as a complete novice, wondering if she’ll ever know what art is, let alone what it means and whether it’s any good (“the familiar feeling that everyone got the punch line except me”). By the end, she has discovered that, like the love of wine, art appreciation can be a way of expanding and savouring one’s life.
The aim was to get the broadest experience possible, generally through voluntary placements. She started out as an assistant at Jack Barrett’s 315 Gallery, where one of her tasks was to paint a wall white; she failed miserably to meet his expectations even for this simple task. He never lost his fundamental distrust of her, a writer and outsider, as one of “the enemy.” It was expected that she would attend as many art shows and openings as possible per week. “Talking shit was essentially a job requirement.” Bosker might not have known what to make of the art, but others were gossipy, snobbish and opinionated enough to make up for it. When she was tasked with writing a press release for an exhibit, a gallerist taught her the clichéd shorthand: “Every f**king artist allegedly transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, or vice versa.”
In the course of the book, the New York City-based author also:
- attends the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair and sells photographs on behalf of Denny Dimin Gallery;
- befriends performance artist and “ass influencer” Mandy AllFIRE, who – ahem – sits on Bosker’s face as part of a temporary installment;
- serves as a studio assistant for French painter Julie Curtiss, whose work is selling for alarmingly high amounts at auction (not actually what a painter wants, as it tends to signal bad things for a career);
- meets a pair of North Dakota collectors known as “the Icy Gays”; and
- works as a Guggenheim Museum guard.
This last was my favourite episode. Forty-minute placements on particular ramps gave her time to focus on one chosen artwork – for instance, an abstract sculpture. She challenged herself to stay with it for that whole time, doing as one artist advised and simply noticing five things about the work. Before, her “default approach to art had just been to plant myself in front of a piece and wait for the epiphany to wash over me.” Now, she worked at it. In fact, she counsels newcomers to not read a caption because many people take a title at face value and an interpretation as gospel, and so don’t experience the art for themselves.
At times I found the book slightly scattered in the way that it zigzags from one challenge to another. There’s differing attention to various experiences; a week-long art school merits just one paragraph. And there’s no getting past the fact that some art she encounters sounds outlandish or just plain silly. (Is it any surprise that she mistakes part of a wall, and a mousetrap, for art pieces?) Ultimately, I think it’s best if you have at least a modicum of appreciation for modern art, which I don’t; whereas I do enjoy drinking wine even if I don’t have a trained palate.
Even so, Bosker’s writing has such verve (“artists were coyly evasive about their work and treated my questions like I was a cactus running after their balloon”; “a hazy daydream of an idea solidified into a yappy, un-shut-uppable chihuahua of want”) that you’ll be glad you went along for the ride. She concludes that taste is subjective, but “Beauty … pulls you close.” Art is valuable because it “knocks us off our well-worn pathways” into something uncharted, a tantalizing prospect.
With thanks to Allen & Unwin (Grove Press) for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS NEXT ONE}
Until August by Gabriel García Márquez
[Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean]
A posthumous ‘lost’ novella was not a good place for me to have started with this celebrated author. García Márquez okayed the fifth draft of the text in 2004, 10 years before his death. By this time he was already suffering with memory loss that interfered with his creativity. His sons got the message that he didn’t think the book worked and should be destroyed. But they didn’t do his bidding and, revisiting the book nearly a decade on from his death, decided it wasn’t that bad, if not up to the standard of his best work, and that it should see the light of day after all.
Every August 16th, Ana Magdalena Bach travels to the island where her mother is buried to visit the grave and lay gladioli on it. (My review book came with a bag of three gladioli bulbs and a mini Colombian chocolate bar.) Each year she takes a different lover for the one night at a hotel. The first time, the man leaves her a $20 bill and she feels ashamed, but it doesn’t stop her doing the same thing again for the next four years in a row. Once it’s a long-ago school friend whom she runs into on the ferry. Another time, by golly, it’s a bishop.
It’s refreshing to have a woman in middle age as protagonist and for her to claim sexual freedom. However, the setup is formulaic and repetitive, the sex scenes are somewhat excruciating, and the hypocrisy of her gleefully having one-night stands while fretting over her husband’s potential infidelity is grating. I did like the ending – Ana hears that an anonymous elderly gentleman has been paying to have gladioli laid on her mother’s grave year-round and she wonders if she is in a sense following in her mother’s footsteps all along without knowing it; and decides she’s had enough and exhumes her mother’s remains, returning to her husband with a bag of bones (gruesome!).
But nothing about the plot or the writing – fluid enough bar one awkward sentence (“She listened to him worried that he meant it, but she had the strength not to appear as easy a woman as he might think”) – suggested to me a master at work. At best, this might be reminiscent of the late work of misogynist-leaning authors like Coetzee or Updike.
In my mind García Márquez is linked with magic realism, so I’d be better off trying one of his more representative works. I have several of his earlier novellas on the shelf (received as review copies as part of the same recent marketing push), and if I get on better with those then I’ll be sure to try one of the most famous full-length novels. 
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis by Greg Wrenn
Wrenn is an associate English professor teaching environmental literature at James Madison University. He has also been exploring coral reefs for 25 years, with a love of marine wildlife sparked by growing up in Florida. But all along, he’s been trying (much like Cyrus Shams) to come to terms with addiction, queerness, suicidal inclinations, and especially his mother’s place in his life. She made him feel dirty, that he would never be good enough; she hit him with a wooden spoon and bathed him until he was 17. Though he never found out for sure, he suspects his mother was sexually abused by her father and repeated the cycle of molestation.
This is the third C-PTSD memoir I’ve read (after What My Bones Know and A Flat Place), and has a lot in common with I’m Glad My Mom Died, which features a co-dependent relationship with an abusive mother. After Wrenn’s parents’ divorce, he and his mother remained close. “I had been her therapist, confessor, girlfriend, and punching bag.” He helped care for her after a stroke but eventually had to throw up his hands at her stubborn refusal to follow doctors’ orders. Drawing on the Greek etymology of ecology (oikos means house or family), Wrenn insists on a parallel between the personal and the environmental here: “What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD” as “Mother” Earth turns against us. On each trip to Raja Ampat, he knows the coral reef is dying, his carbon footprint only accelerating it.
There’s a lot in this short memoir. Even the summary had me shaking my head in disbelief. For me, though, the tone and style were too erratic. Wrenn can be wry, sorrowful, or campy; he includes scientific data, letters to Adrienne Rich and an imagined descendent, a chapter riffing on “Otters” (the animal and the gay stereotype), flashbacks, and E.T. metaphors. The final third of the book then takes a left turn as he experiments with therapeutic psychedelics via ayahuasca ceremonies in South America, and ditches dating apps and casual sex to try to find a long-term relationship. The drug literally alters his brain, allowing him to feel trust and love. Add on nature and a husband and that’s why he’s still here rather than dead by suicide.
Like Akbar, Wrenn published poetry before switching genre. Their books are both amazing in premise but wobbly in execution. Still, I’d say both authors are laudable for their effort to depict lives wrenched back from extremity. 
With thanks to Regalo Press (USA) for the proof copy for review.
Reviewing Two Books by Cancelled Authors
I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about these authors’ reasons for being cancelled, although in my review of the Clanchy I’ve noted the textual examples that have been cited as problematic. Alexie is among the legion of male public figures to have been accused of sexual misconduct in recent years. I’m not saying those aren’t serious allegations, but as Claire Dederer wrestled with in Monsters, our judgement of a person can be separate from our response to their work. So that’s the good news: I thought these were both fantastic books. They share a theme of education.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (illus. Ellen Forney) (2007)
Alexie is to be lauded for his contributions to the flourishing of both Indigenous literature and YA literature. This was my first of his books and I don’t know a thing about him or the rest of his work. But I feel like this must have groundbreaking for its time (or maybe a throwback to Adrian Mole et al.), and I suspect it’s more than a little autobiographical.
It reads exactly like a horny 14-year-old boy’s diary, but “Junior” (Arnold Spirit, Jr.) is also self-deprecating and sweetly vulnerable; Alexie’s tone is spot on. Junior has had a tough life on a Spokane reservation in Washington, being bullied for his poor eyesight and speech impediments that resulted from brain damage at birth and ongoing seizures. Poverty, alcoholism, casinos: they don’t feel like clichés of Indian reservations here because Alexie writes from experience and presents them matter-of-factly. Junior’s parents never got to pursue their dreams and his sister has run away to Montana, but he has a chance to change the trajectory. A rez teacher says his only hope for a bright future is to transfer to the elite high school in Reardan. So he does, even though it often requires hitch-hiking or walking miles.
Junior soon becomes adept at code-switching: “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other.” He gets a white girlfriend, Penelope, but has to work hard to conceal how impoverished he is. His best friend, Rowdy, is furious with him for abandoning his people. That resentment builds all the way to a climactic basketball match between Reardan and Wellpinit that also functions as a symbolic battle between the parts of Junior’s identity. Along the way, there are multiple tragic deaths in which alcohol, inevitably, plays a role. “I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals,” he confides. “Jeez, what a sucky life. … I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That’s the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change.”
One of those joys, for him, is cartooning. Describing his cartoons to his new white friend, Gordy, he says, “I use them to understand the world.”
Forney’s black-and-white illustrations make the cartoons look like found objects – creased scraps of notebook paper sellotaped into a diary. This isn’t a graphic novel, but most of the short chapters include several illustrations. There’s a casual intimacy to the whole book that feels absolutely authentic. Bridging the particular and universal, it’s a heartfelt gem, and not just for teens. (University library) 
Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy (2019)
If your Twitter sphere and mine overlap, you may remember the controversy over the racialized descriptions in this Orwell Prize-winning memoir of 30 years of teaching – and the fact that, rather than issuing a humbled apology, Clanchy, at least initially, doubled down and refuted all objections, even when they came from BIPOC. It wasn’t a good look. Nor was it the first time I’ve found Clanchy to be prickly. (She is what, in another time, might have been called a formidable woman.) Anyway, I waited a few years for the furore to die down before trying this for myself.
I know vanishingly little about the British education system because I don’t have children and only experienced uni here at a distance, through my junior year abroad. So there may be class-based nuances I missed – for instance, in the chapter about selecting a school for her oldest son and comparing it with the underprivileged Essex school where she taught. But it’s clear that a lot of her students posed serious challenges. Many were refugees or immigrants, and she worked for a time on an “Inclusion Unit,” which seems to be more in the business of exclusion in that it’s for students who have been removed from regular classrooms. They came from bad family situations and were more likely to end up in prison or pregnant. To get any of them to connect with Shakespeare, or write their own poetry, was a minor miracle.
Clanchy is also a poet and novelist – I’ve read one of her novels, and her Selected Poems – and did much to encourage her students to develop a voice and the confidence to have their work published (she’s produced anthologies of student work). In many cases, she gave them strategies for giving literary shape to traumatic memories. The book’s engaging vignettes have all had the identifying details removed, and are collected under thematic headings that address the second part of the title: “About Love, Sex, and the Limits of Embarrassment” and “About Nations, Papers, and Where We Belong” are two example chapters. She doesn’t avoid contentious topics, either: the hijab, religion, mental illness and so on.
You get the feeling that she was a friend and mentor to her students, not just their teacher, and that they could talk to her about anything and rely on her support. Watching them grow in self-expression is heart-warming; we come to care for these young people, too, because of how sincerely they have been created from amalgams. Indeed, Clanchy writes in the introduction that “I have included nobody, teacher or pupil, about whom I could not write with love.”
And that is, I think, why she was so hurt and disbelieving when people pointed out racism in her characterization:
I was baffled when a boy with jet-black hair and eyes and a fine Ashkenazi nose named David Marks refused any Jewish heritage
her furry eyebrows, her slanting, sparking black eyes, her general, Mongolian ferocity. [but she’s Afghan??]
(of girls in hijabs) I never saw their (Asian/silky/curly?) hair in eight years.
They’re a funny pair: Izzat so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache; Mo so rounded and mellow and Pakistani with his long-lashed eyes and soft glossy hair.
There are a few other ill-advised passages. She admits she can’t tell the difference between Kenyan and Somali faces; she ponders whether being a Scot in England gave her some taste of the prejudice refugees experience. And there’s this passage about sexuality:
Are we all ‘fluid’ now? Perhaps. It is commonplace to proclaim oneself transsexual. And to actually be gay, especially if you are as pretty as Kristen Stewart, is positively fashionable. A couple of kids have even changed gender, a decision … deliciously of the moment
My take: Clanchy wanted to craft affectionate pen portraits that celebrated children’s uniqueness, but had to make them anonymous, so resorted to generalizations. Doing this on a country or ethnicity basis was the mistake. Journalistic realism doesn’t require a focus on appearances (I would hope that, if I were ever profiled, someone could find more interesting things to say about me than that I am short and have a large nose). She could have just introduced the students with ‘facts,’ e.g., “Shakila, from Afghanistan, wore a hijab and was feisty and outspoken.” Note to self: white people can be clueless, and we need to listen and learn. The book was reissued in 2022 by independent publisher Swift Press, with offending passages removed (see here for more info). I’d be keen to see the result and hope that the book will find more readers because, truly, it is lovely. (Little Free Library) 
#NovNov23 Week 4, “The Short and the Long of It”: W. Somerset Maugham & Jan Morris
Hard to believe, but it’s already the final full week of Novellas in November and we have had 109 posts so far! This week’s prompt is “The Short and the Long of It,” for which we encourage you to pair a novella with a nonfiction book or novel that deals with similar themes or topics. The book pairings week of Nonfiction November is always a favourite (my 2023 contribution is here), so think of this as an adjacent – and hopefully fun – project. I came up with two pairs: one fiction and one nonfiction. In the first case, the longer book led me to read a novella, and it was vice versa for the second.
W. Somerset Maugham
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (2023)
&
Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham (1897)
I wasn’t a huge fan of The Garden of Evening Mists, but as soon as I heard that Tan Twan Eng’s third novel was about W. Somerset Maugham, I was keen to read it. Maugham is a reliably readable author; his books are clearly classic literature but don’t pose the stylistic difficulties I now experience with Dickens, Trollope et al. And yet I know that Booker Prize followers who had neither heard of nor read Maugham have enjoyed this equally. I’m surprised it didn’t make it past the longlist stage, as I found it as revealing of a closeted gay writer’s life and times as The Master (shortlisted in 2004) but wider in scope and more rollicking because of its less familiar setting, true crime plot and female narration.
The main action is set in 1921, as “Willie” Somerset Maugham and his secretary, Gerald, widely known to be his lover, rest from their travels in China and the South Seas via a two-week stay with Robert and Lesley Hamlyn at Cassowary House in Penang, Malaysia. Robert and Willie are old friends, and all three men fought in the First World War. Willie’s marriage to Syrie Wellcome (her first husband was the pharmaceutical tycoon) is floundering and he faces financial ruin after a bad investment. He needs a good story that will sell and gets one when Lesley starts recounting to him the momentous events of 1910, including a crisis in her marriage, volunteering at the party office of Chinese pro-democracy revolutionary Dr Sun Yat Sen, and trying to save her friend Ethel Proudlock from a murder charge.
It’s clever how Tan weaves all of this into a Maugham-esque plot that alternates between omniscient third-person narration and Lesley’s own telling. The glimpses of expat life and Asia under colonial rule are intriguing, and the scene-setting and atmosphere are sumptuous – worthy of the Merchant Ivory treatment. I was left curious to read more by and about Maugham, such as Selina Hastings’ biography. (Public library) 
But for now I picked up one of the leather-bound Maugham books I got for free a few years ago. Amusingly, the novella-length Liza of Lambeth is printed in the same volume with the travel book On a Chinese Screen, which Maugham had just released when he arrived in Penang.
{SPOILERS AHEAD}
This was Maugham’s debut novel and drew on his time as a medical intern in the slums of London. In tone and content it falls almost perfectly between Dickens and Hardy, because on the one hand Liza Kemp and her neighbours are cheerful paupers even though they work in factories, have too many children and live in cramped quarters; on the other hand, alcoholism and domestic violence are rife, and the wages of sexual sin are death. All seems light to start with: an all-village outing to picnic at Chingford; pub trips; and harmless wooing as Liza rebuffs sweet Tom in favour of a flirtation with married Jim Blakeston.
At the halfway point, I thought we were going full Tess of the d’Urbervilles – how is this not a rape scene?! Jim propositions her four times, ignoring her initial No and later quiet. “‘Liza, will yer?’ She still kept silence, looking away … Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his fist gave her a violent, swinging blow in the belly. ‘Come on,’ he said. And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.” So starts their affair, which leads to Liza getting beaten up by Mrs Blakeston in the street and then dying of an infection after a miscarriage. The most awful character is Mrs Kemp, who spends the last few pages – while Liza is literally on her deathbed – complaining of her own hardships, congratulating herself on insuring her daughter’s life, and telling a blackly comic story about her husband’s corpse not fitting in his oak coffin and her and the undertaker having to jump on the lid to get it to close.
Liza isn’t entirely the stereotypical whore with the heart of gold, but she is a good-time girl (“They were delighted to have Liza among them, for where she was there was no dullness”) and I wonder if she could even have been a starting point for Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Maugham’s rendering of the cockney accent is over-the-top –
“‘An’ when I come aht,’ she went on, ‘’oo should I see just passin’ the ’orspital but this ’ere cove, an’ ’e says to me, ‘Wot cheer,’ says ’e, ‘I’m goin’ ter Vaux’all, come an’ walk a bit of the wy with us.’ ‘Arright,’ says I, ‘I don’t mind if I do.’”
– but his characters are less caricatured than Dickens’s. And, imagine, even then there was congestion in London:
“They drove along eastwards, and as the hour grew later the streets became more filled and the traffic greater. At last they got on the road to Chingford, and caught up numbers of other vehicles going in the same direction—donkey-shays, pony-carts, tradesmen’s carts, dog-carts, drags, brakes, every conceivable kind of wheeled thing, all filled with people”
In short, this was a minor and derivative-feeling work that I wouldn’t recommend to those new to Maugham. He hadn’t found his true style and subject matter yet. Luckily, there’s plenty of other novels to try. (Free mall bookshop) [159 pages]
Jan Morris
Conundrum by Jan Morris (1974)
&
Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides, A Biography by Paul Clements (2022)
Back in 2021, I reread and reviewed Conundrum during Novellas in November. It’s a short memoir that documents her spiritual journey towards her true identity – she was a trans pioneer and influential on my own understanding of gender. In his doorstopper of a biography, Paul Clements is careful to use female pronouns throughout, even when this is a little confusing (with Morris a choirboy, a soldier, an Oxford student, a father, and a member of the Times expedition that first summited Everest). I’m just over a quarter of the way through the book now. Morris left the Times before the age of 30, already the author of several successful travel books on the USA and the Middle East. I’ll have to report back via Love Your Library on what I think of this overall. At this point I feel like it’s a pretty workaday biography, comprehensive and drawing heavily on Morris’s own writings. The focus is on the work and the travels, as well as how the two interacted and influenced her life.
The Best Books from the First Half of 2023
Yes, it’s that time of year already! It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year list, but for now, these are my 20 highlights. Plus, I sneakily preview another great novel that won’t release until September. (For now I’m highlighting 2023 releases, whereas at the end of the year I divide my best-of lists into current year and backlist. I’ve read 86 current-year releases so far and am working on another 20, so I’m essentially designating a top 20% here.) I give review excerpts and link to the full text from this site or elsewhere. Pictured below are the books I read in print; all the others were e-copies.
Fiction
Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman: In 16 sumptuous historical stories, outsiders and pioneers face disability and prejudice with poise. The flash entries crystallize moments of realization, often about health. Longer pieces shine as their out-of-the-ordinary romances have space to develop. In the novella Casting Grand Titans, a botany professor in 1850s Iowa learns her salary is 6% of a male colleague’s. She strives for intellectual freedom, reporting a new-to-science species of moss, while working towards liberation for runaway slaves.
The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland: Moving at a propulsive pace, Beanland’s powerful second novel rotates through the perspectives of these main characters – two men and two women; two white people and two enslaved Black people – caught up in the Richmond Theater Fire of 1811 (one of the deadliest events in early U.S. history) and its aftermath. Painstakingly researched and full of historical detail and full-blooded characters, it dramatizes the range of responses to tragedy and how people rebuild their lives.
The New Life by Tom Crewe: Two 1890s English sex researchers (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) write a book called Sexual Inversion drawing on ancient Greek history and containing case studies of homosexual behaviour. Oscar Wilde’s trial puts everyone on edge; not long afterwards, their own book becomes the subject of an obscenity trial, and each man has to decide what he’s willing to give up in devotion to his principles. This is deeply, frankly erotic stuff, and, on the sentence level, just exquisite writing.
Daughters of Nantucket by Julie Gerstenblatt: (Yes, another historical fire novel, and I reviewed both for Shelf Awareness!) This engrossing debut explores the options for women in the mid-19th century. Metaphorical conflagrations blaze in the background in the days leading up to the great Nantucket fire of 1846: each of three female protagonists (a whaling captain’s wife, a museum curator, and a pregnant Black entrepreneur) holds a burning secret and longs for a more expansive, authentic life. Tense and sultry; for Sue Monk Kidd fans.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai: When an invitation comes from her boarding school alma mater, Granby, to teach a two-week course on podcasting, Bodie indulges her obsession with the 1995 murder of her former roommate. Makkai has taken her cues from the true crime genre and constructed a convincing mesh of evidence and theories. She so carefully crafts her pen portraits, and so intimately involves us in Bodie’s psyche, that it’s impossible not to get invested. This is timely, daring, intelligent, enthralling storytelling.
Sidle Creek by Jolene McIlwain: In this debut collection of 22 short stories, loosely linked by their location in the Appalachian hills in western Pennsylvania and a couple of recurring minor characters, McIlwain softens the harsh realities of addiction, poverty and violence with the tender bruises of infertility and lost love. Grief is a resonant theme in many of the stories, with pregnancy or infant loss a recurring element. At times harrowing, always clear-eyed, these stories are true to life and compassionate about human foibles and animal pain.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: Oprah’s 100th book club pick. It’s a family story spanning three decades and focusing on the Padavanos, a working-class Italian American Chicago clan with four daughters. Julia meets melancholy basketball player William Waters while at Northwestern in the late 1970s. There is such warmth and intensity to the telling, and brave reckoning with bereavement, mental illness, prejudice and trauma. I love sister stories in general, and the subtle echoes of Leaves of Grass and Little Women add heft.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Through her work as a writer for a sketch comedy show modelled on Saturday Night Live, Sally Milz meets Noah Brewster, a pop star with surfer-boy good looks. Plain Jane getting the hot guy – that never happens, right? In fact, Sally has a theory about this very dilemma… As always, Sittenfeld’s inhabiting of a first-person narrator is flawless, and Sally’s backstory and Covid-lockdown existence endeared her to me. Could this be called predictable? Well, what does one want from a romcom?
In Memoriam by Alice Winn: Heartstopper on the Western Front; swoon! Will Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt both acknowledge that this is love and not just sex, as it is for so many teenage boys at their English boarding school? And will one or both survive the trenches of the First World War? Winn depicts the full horror of war, but in between there is banter, friendship and poetry. Some moments are downright jolly. This debut is obsessively researched, but Winn has a light touch with it. Engaging, thrilling, and, yes, romantic.
A bonus:
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (Riverhead/Hutchinson Heinemann, 12 September): Groff’s fifth novel combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep as it chronicles a runaway Jamestown servant’s struggle to endure the winter of 1610. Flashbacks to traumatic events seep into her mind as she copes with the harsh reality of life in the wilderness. The style is archaic and postmodern all at once. Evocative and affecting – and as brutal as anything Cormac McCarthy wrote. A potent, timely fable as much as a historical novel. (Review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness.)
Nonfiction
All My Wild Mothers by Victoria Bennett: A lovely memoir about grief and gardening, caring for an ill child and a dying parent. The book is composed of dozens of brief autobiographical, present-tense essays, each titled after a wildflower with traditional healing properties. The format realistically presents bereavement and caring as ongoing, cyclical challenges rather than one-time events. Sitting somewhere between creative nonfiction and nature essays, it’s a beautiful read for any fan of women’s life writing.
Monsters by Claire Dederer: The question posed by this hybrid work of memoir and cultural criticism is “Are we still allowed to enjoy the art made by horrible people?” It begins, in the wake of #MeToo, by reassessing the work of film directors Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. The book is as compassionate as it is incisive. While there is plenty of outrage, there is also much nuance. Dederer’s prose is forthright and droll; lucid even when tackling thorny issues. Erudite, empathetic and engaging from start to finish.
Womb by Leah Hazard: A wide-ranging and accessible study of the uterus, this casts a feminist eye over history and future alike. Blending medical knowledge and cultural commentary, it cannot fail to have both personal and political significance for readers of any gender. The thematic structure of the chapters also functions as a roughly chronological tour of how life with a uterus might proceed: menstruation, conception, pregnancy, labour, caesarean section, ongoing health issues, menopause. Inclusive and respectful of diversity.
Sea Bean by Sally Huband: Stories of motherhood, the quest to find effective treatment in a patriarchal medical system, volunteer citizen science projects, and studying Shetland’s history and customs mingle in a fascinating way. Huband travels around the archipelago and further afield, finding vibrant beachcombing cultures. In many ways, this is about coming to terms with loss, and the author presents the facts about climate crisis with sombre determination. She writes with such poetic tenderness in this radiant debut memoir.
Marry Me a Little by Robert Kirby: Hopping around in time, this graphic memoir tells the story of how the author and his partner John decided to get married in 2013. The blue and red color scheme is effective at evoking a polarized America and the ebb and flow of emotions, with blue for calm, happy scenes and concentrated red for confusion or anger. This is political, for sure, but it’s also personal, and it balances those two aims well by tracing the history of gay marriage in the USA and memorializing his own relationship.
All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer: In 2019, Vollmer’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Months later, his father reported blinking lights in the woods near the family cemetery. Although Vollmer had left the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in college, his religious upbringing influenced his investigation, which overlapped with COVID-19. Grief, mysticism, and acceptance of the unexplained are resonant themes. An unforgettable record of “a collision with the ineffable.”
Eggs in Purgatory by Genanne Walsh: This autobiographical essay tells the story of the last few months of her father’s life. Aged 89, he lived downstairs from Walsh and her wife in San Francisco. He was quite the character: idealist, stubborn, outspoken; a former Catholic priest. Although he had no terminal conditions, he was sick of old age and its indignities and ready to exit. The task of a memoir is to fully mine the personal details of a situation but make of it something universal, and that’s just what she does here. Stunning.
Poetry
More Sky by Joe Carrick-Varty: In this debut collection, the fact of his alcoholic father’s suicide is inescapable. The poet alternates between an intimate “you” address and third-person scenarios, auditioning coping mechanisms. His frame of reference is wide: football, rappers, Buddhist cosmology. The word “suicide” itself is repeated to the point where it becomes just a sibilant collection of syllables. The tone is often bitter, as is to be expected, but there is joy in the deft use of language.
Lo by Melissa Crowe: This incandescent autobiographical collection delves into the reality of sexual abuse and growing up in rural poverty. Guns are insidious, used for hunting or mass shootings. Trauma lingers. “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” The collection is so carefully balanced in tone that it never feels bleak. In elegies and epithalamiums (poems celebrating marriage), Crowe honors family ties that bring solace. The collection has emotional range: sensuality, fear, and wonder at natural beauty.
Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris: This debut collection addresses the symptoms and side effects of breast cancer treatment at age 36, but often in oblique or cheeky ways – it can be no mistake that “assistance” appears two lines before a mention of haemorrhoids, for instance, even though it closes an epithalamium distinguished by its gentle sibilance (Farris’s husband is Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky.) She crafts sensual love poems, and exhibits Japanese influences. (Review forthcoming at The Rumpus.)
The House of the Interpreter by Lisa Kelly: Kelly is half-Danish and has single-sided deafness, and her second collection engages with questions of split identity. One section ends with the Deaf community’s outrage that the Prime Minister’s Covid briefings were not translated into BSL. Bizarre but delightful is the sequence of alliteration-rich poems about fungi, followed by a miscellany of autobiographical poems full of references to colour, nature and travel.
What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?
What 2023 releases should I catch up on right away?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 