Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Costello, O’Shaughnessy & Smyth
These three books – two novels and a memoir – pay loving tribute to a particular nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer. In each case, the author incorporates passages of pastiche, moving beyond thematic similarity to make their language an additional homage.
Although I enjoyed the three books very much, they differ in terms of how familiar you should be with the source material before embarkation. So while they were all 
reads for me, I have added a note below each review to indicate the level of prior knowledge needed.
The River Capture by Mary Costello
Luke O’Brien has taken a long sabbatical from his teaching job in Dublin and is back living at the family farm beside the river in Waterford. Though only in his mid-thirties, he seems like a man of sorrows, often dwelling on the loss of parents, aunts and romantic relationships with both men and women. He takes quiet pleasure in food, the company of pets, and books, including his extensive collection on James Joyce, about whom he’d like to write a tome of his own. The novel’s very gentle crisis comes when Luke falls for Ruth and it emerges that her late father ruined his beloved Aunt Ellen’s reputation.
At this point a troubled Luke is driven into 100+ pages of sinuous contemplation, a bravura section of short fragments headed by questions. Rather like a catechism, it’s a playful way of organizing his thoughts and likely more than a little Joycean in approach – I’ve read Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners but not Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, so I feel less than able to comment on the literary ventriloquism, but I found this a pleasingly over-the-top stream-of-consciousness that ranges from the profound (“What fear suddenly assails him? The arrival of the noonday demon”) to the scatological (“At what point does he urinate? At approximately three-quarters of the way up the avenue”).
While this doesn’t quite match Costello’s near-perfect novella, Academy Street, it’s an impressive experiment in voice and style, and the treatment of Luke’s bisexuality struck me as sensitive – an apt metaphorical manifestation of the novel’s focus on fluidity. (See also Susan’s excellent review.)
Why Joyce? “integrity … commitment to the quotidian … refusal to take conventions for granted”
Familiarity required: Moderate
Also recommended: The Sixteenth of June by Maya Lang
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
In Love with George Eliot by Kathy O’Shaughnessy
Many characters, fictional and historical, are in love with George Eliot over the course of this debut novel by a literary editor. The whole thing is a book within a book – fiction being written by Kate, an academic at London’s Queen Elizabeth College who’s preparing for two conferences on Eliot and a new co-taught course on life writing at the same time as she completes her novel, which blends biographical information and imagined scenes.
1857: Eliot is living with George Henry Lewes, her common-law husband, and working on Adam Bede, which becomes a runaway success, not least because of speculation about its anonymous author. 1880: The great author’s death leaves behind a mentally unstable widower 20 years her junior, John Walter Cross, once such a close family friend that she and Lewes called him “Nephew.”
Between these points are intriguing vignettes from Eliot’s life with her two great loves, and insight into her scandalous position in Victorian society. Her estrangement from her dear brother (the model for Tom in The Mill on the Floss) is a plangent refrain, while interactions with female friends who have accepted the norms of marriage and motherhood reveal just how transgressive her life is perceived to be.
In the historical sections O’Shaughnessy mimics Victorian prose ably, yet avoids the convoluted syntax that can make Eliot challenging. I might have liked a bit more of the contemporary story line, in which Kate and an alluring colleague make their way to Venice (the site of Eliot’s legendarily disastrous honeymoon trip with Cross), but by making this a minor thread O’Shaughnessy ensures that the spotlight remains on Eliot throughout.
Highlights: A cameo appearance by Henry James; a surprisingly sexy passage in which Cross and Eliot read Dante aloud to each other and share their first kiss.
Why Eliot? “As an artist, this was her task, to move the reader to see people in the round.”
Familiarity required: Low
Also recommended: 142 Strand by Rosemary Ashton, Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker, and My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
With thanks to Scribe UK for the free copy for review.
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf by Katharine Smyth
Smyth first read To the Lighthouse in Christmas 2001, during her junior year abroad at Oxford. Shortly thereafter her father had surgery in Boston to remove his bladder, one of many operations he’d had during a decade battling cancer. But even this new health scare wasn’t enough to keep him from returning to his habitual three bottles of wine a day. Woolf was there for Smyth during this crisis and all the time leading up to her father’s death, with Lighthouse and Woolf’s own life reflecting Smyth’s experience in unanticipated ways. The Smyths’ Rhode Island beach house, for instance, was reminiscent of the Stephens’ home in Cornwall. Woolf’s mother’s death was an end to the summer visits, and to her childhood; Lighthouse would become her elegy to those bygone days.
Often a short passage by or about Woolf is enough to launch Smyth back into her memories. As an only child, she envied the busy family life of the Ramsays in Lighthouse. She delves into the mystery of her parents’ marriage and her father’s faltering architecture career. She also undertakes Woolf tourism, including the Cornwall cottage, Knole, Charleston and Monk’s House (where Woolf wrote most of Lighthouse). Her writing is dreamy, mingling past and present as she muses on time and grief. The passages of Woolf pastiche are obvious but short enough not to overstay their welcome; as in the Costello, they tend to feature water imagery. It’s a most unusual book in the conception, but for Woolf fans especially, it works. However, I wished I had read Lighthouse more recently than 16.5 years ago – it’s one to reread.
Why Woolf? “I think it’s Woolf’s mastery of moments like these—moments that hold up a mirror to our private tumult while also revealing how much we as humans share—that most draws me to her.”
Undergraduate wisdom: “Woolf’s technique: taking a very complex (usually female) character and using her mind as an emblem of all minds” [copied from notes I took during a lecture on To the Lighthouse in a “Modern Wasteland” course during my sophomore year of college]
Familiarity required: High
Also recommended: Virginia Woolf in Manhattan by Maggie Gee, Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar, and Adeline by Norah Vincent
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Reviews Roundup, April–May
One of my goals with this blog is to have one convenient place where I can gather together all my writing that has appeared in disparate online locations. To that end, once a month – or maybe more often – I’ll provide links to all the book reviews I’ve published elsewhere, with a rating and a short taster so you can decide whether to click to read more. (A couple of exceptions: I won’t point out my Kirkus Indie or BlueInk reviews since I don’t get a byline.)
[I seem to have done more ‘free’ than ‘required’ reading this past month, which I attribute to having been on vacation in America for about two weeks of that time.]
BookBrowse
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy [subscription service, but an excerpt is available for free on the website]: In Flournoy’s debut novel, the 13 grown children of Francis and Viola Turner must put aside their own personal baggage and decide what will become of their parents’ Detroit house during the financial crisis.
The Bookbag
Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett: This sequel to 2012’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning science fiction novel Dark Eden sees Gela’s descendants splitting into factions and experimenting with different political systems. Starlight Brooking emerges as a Messiah figure, spreading a secret message of equality. Releases June 4th.
Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker: In Duncker’s sixth novel, a playful Victorian pastiche, George Eliot’s interactions with her German publisher and his feisty young wife provide fodder for Daniel Deronda. Consciously modeled on John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, this is a postmodern blending of history, fiction, and metafictional commentary.
We Love This Book
The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan: This inventive debut novel imagines a circus traveling through a flooded future world. Humanity is divided into two races, landlockers and damplings. Fear and prejudice distance these groups but the novel imagines them drawn together through a meeting between two young women, Callanish and North.
Foreword Reviews
The Organ Broker by Stu Strumwasser: “There is no shortage of organs; there is only a shortage of organs in America.” The antihero of this debut novel finds organs on the international market and sells them for huge profits to Americans on transplant waiting lists. With snappy dialogue and a lovable hustler protagonist, it explores ethical ambiguities.
BookTrib
I chose my top four mother–daughter memoirs (by Alice Eve Cohen, Abigail Thomas, Alison Bechdel and Jeanette Winterson) for this Mother’s Day article.
I also post reviews of most of my casual reading on Goodreads.
Mademoiselle Chanel by C.W. Gortner: A writer of Tudor-era mysteries turns to more recent history with this novel about Coco Chanel. Detailing every business venture and love affair, he makes some parts a real chronological slog. I always associate Chanel with the 1950s–60s, so it was interesting to learn that she was born in the 1880s and experienced both world wars.
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison: I liked the medical-related pieces – attending a Morgellons disease conference, working as a medical actor – but not the Latin American travel essays or the character studies. The overarching theme of empathy was not as strong as I thought it would be; really, the book is more about how experiences mark the body.
The Real Thing: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter’s Notebook by Ellen McCarthy: McCarthy writes about weddings and relationships for The Washington Post. This is a collection of short pieces about modern dating, breakups, wedding ceremonies, marriage, and making love last. The style is breezy and humorous, largely anecdote- and interview-based, with some heartfelt moments. If you’re a wedding junkie you’ll definitely enjoy it, but I didn’t think it broke new ground.
Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder by Amy E. Butcher: The facts are simple: one night towards the end of their senior year at Gettysburg College, Kevin Schaeffer walked Butcher home from a drunken outing, then stabbed his ex-girlfriend to death. This book has elements of a true crime narrative, detailing the crime and speculating on possible causes for Kevin’s psychotic episode, but it’s more about how the crime affected Butcher. This is a concise and gripping narrative reminiscent of Half a Life by Darin Strauss.
A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell: Vee, Lady and Delph are the fourth generation of Alters, a Jewish family cursed with a rash of suicides. Indeed, the majority of the novel is the middle-aged sisters’ collective suicide note, narrated in the first-person plural. They reach back into the past to give the stories of their ancestors, including great-grandparents Iris and Lenz Alter, the latter of whom had the ironic distinction of being the Jewish creator of Zyklon gas (based on a real figure).
Beloved Strangers: A Memoir by Maria Chaudhuri: Islam versus Christianity is a background note, but the major theme is East versus West – specifically, Chaudhuri’s native Bangladesh set against America, where she attended university and later lived and worked. Religion, sexuality, dreams and second chances at love are all facets of the author’s search for a sense of home and family in a life of shifting loyalties. (My full review will appear in the autumn 2015 issue of Wasafiri literary magazine.)
The Shore by Sara Taylor: Gritty and virtuosic, this novel-in-13-stories imagines 250 years of history on a set of islands off the coast of Virginia. As a Maryland native, I think of Chincoteague and Assateague as vacation destinations, but Taylor definitely focuses on their dark side here: industrial-scale chicken farms, unwanted pregnancies, domestic violence, bootleg liquor, gang rape, murders and meth labs.
Echoes of Heartsounds: A Memoir by Martha Weinman Lear: Longtime New York City journalist Lear’s first husband, a doctor named Hal, died after a series of heart attacks. Ironically, 30 years later she was admitted to the same hospital for a heart attack – an event that presents completely differently in women. As a sequel to her previous memoir, Heartsounds (1980), this explores life’s odd parallels and repetitions.
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald: A Swedish tourist opens a bookstore in small-town Iowa. Given that she’d never visited the States at the time she wrote this novel (published in her native Sweden in 2013), Bivald has painted a remarkably accurate picture of a Midwestern town peopled with fundamentalists, gays, rednecks and a gun-toting diner owner. A cute read for book lovers, provided you can stomach a bit of chick lit / romance.
Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness by Sasha Martin: Martin writes well and I enjoyed this book overall, but at times you may become frustrated and ask “where’s the food?!” That’s because the makeup of this book is: Misery Memoir – 70% / Global Table Adventure blog – 30%. Martin had the idea to cook dishes from every country of the world. At the rate of one feast per weekend, the blog project took four years. She manages to give a fairly comprehensive overview of the cooking she did over that time.
Plumb Line by Steve Luttrell: Disappointingly average poems about nature and memory. The situations and sentiments are relatable but the language so plain that nothing sticks out.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert: The picture Kolbert paints of our environmental situation is depressing. I already knew the facts of climate change and animal extinction, but according to Kolbert the prognosis is even worse than I was aware. As a longtime New Yorker journalist, she writes at a good level for laymen: not talking down, nor assuming any specialist knowledge. Luckily, there are spots of humor to lighten the tone.
Circling the Sun by Paula McLain: This is just as good as The Paris Wife – if not better. I didn’t think I was very interested in aviatrix Beryl Markham, but McLain proved me wrong. The love triangle between her, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Denys Finch Hatton forms the kernel of the book. McLain describes her African settings beautifully, and focuses as much on the small emotional moments that make a life as she does on the external thrills, though there are plenty of those.
The Size of Our Bed by Jacqueline Tchakalian: Well-structured and grouped into thematic sections, these poems are primarily about motherhood, the death of a much-loved husband from cancer, and adjusting to the reality of war. Alliteration and assonance stand in for traditional rhymes. Tchakalian is especially good with colors and flowers, which combine to create memorable metaphors. Releases September 15th.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 