New Century Reading

Night and Day

I'm on a quest to read, in order of publication, all of Virginia Woolf's novels (there are 10). I've already read 7 of them, but I wanted to see her writing development as it progressed. Last month I read her debut novel, The Voyage Out, which I didn't bother to blog about. It's not bad, but it's also not great. However, her second novel, Night and Day, is a big step up. She hadn't yet gotten to her full innovative powers yet, but you can see how she's beginning to detach a little from traditional novels of the period. 

Night and Day is a book in which not an awful lot happens. The world of the interior, of the mind and emotion, is mostly what Woolf is going for. It's the story of Katharine Hilberry, an only child living as an adult with her indulgent parents. Katharine is beautiful and observes all the proper social decorum, but inside she wants more. At night, she spends hours working on mathematics, wishing she had the ability to pursue education in that line instead of being stuck as a female in a family that had a famous literary ancestor whose reputation and biography they endeavor to keep alive. 

Into her world come two men, Ralph Denham and William Rodney. Both love her; Rodney is the obvious choice, as he's her social equal, while Denham is not. But Katharine, cool and withdrawn, feels she has little choice but to accept William even though she knows she doesn't love him. Ralph is devastated and tries to strike up a courtship with another female friend. But William and Katharine both have some doubts and some hard conversations.

So, yes, a romantic intrigue, but there's much here besides that: ruminations on the end of the Victorian era, what exactly is love, what is the point of marriage, and, importantly, should women have careers and vocations. Woolf explores what the morals and accepted behaviors of the period were, and why they weren't something necessarily worth preserving. 

Within these lofty explorations are some missteps. A subplot about an errant family member who had children with a woman he wasn't married to is raised, explored, then dropped. There are some plot points that are borderline ridiculous (which, according to the introduction to my edition, may have been deliberate on Woolf's part, to parody books of the day). 

But throughout there is some wonderful, Woolfian writing:

"The three of them stood for a moment awkwardly silent, and then Mary left them in order to see the great pitcher of coffee was properly handled, for beneath all her education she preserved the anxieties of one who owns china."

"The whole aspect of the place started another train of thought and struck her as enviably free; in such a room one could work--one could have a life of one's own."

Worth reading, and also worth reading Lauren Groff's recent wonderful essay about it.  

Agnes Grey

January 17, 2020 marked the 200th anniversary of Anne Bronte's birth, and as such, I thought I'd revisit one of her novels. My book club read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not that long ago, so I decided to go with Agnes Grey, which I don't think I've read since college.

Agnes Grey is the story of a young woman from a not-well-off family. Agnes decides to become a governess, one of the few respectable options at the time, and sets off for her first assignment. It's a nightmare. The children have been raised to think they can do no wrong, and the parents aren't interested in the governess' opinions. Agnes is eventually fired, but tries again, and gets a somewhat better (only marginally) position that she sticks with for several years, until her father dies and she returns home to help her mother. There is a bit of romantic interest, which shouldn't be a spoiler (it's an old book, people) to say ends well. 

I didn't expect much; Anne is somewhat considered the "lesser" Bronte, and this her lesser book. But I ended up being drawn in and quite interested in the story, and found more to like than I remembered. Poor Anne has suffered from comparisons to her sisters, especially Charlotte. Charlotte, after all, wrote the governess novel: Jane Eyre. In fact, Anne wrote Agnes Grey before Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, but Charlotte had the good fortune to see her novel published before Anne did. Anne was then stuck with the comparisons and the insinuation that she'd written after Charlotte.

There's a great Guardian story that goes over the history of the book and makes an impassioned plea as to Agnes Grey's value and importance in literary history. Notably, while Jane Eyre had an unusually ideal first position in a lovely home with only one student and a kindly housekeeper who's on her side, Agnes Grey tells a different--and more accurate--story of governessing during that time. Multiple kids, unsupportive parents with unreasonable expectations and demands, and terrible loneliness; a governess was in a limited social strata where she wasn't good enough to socialize with the adults of the family, but she was considered above being able to befriend the servants (after all, who's want a servant teaching their children?). Agnes shows us all the indignities and miseries of this life. It's more than a little heartbreaking that Anne allowed Agnes to have the happy ending Anne herself did not get, dying at age 29 of tuberculosis. 

I'm glad I took the time to revisit this book, and think I will also try Tenant again. I didn't have a terribly favorable impression of it the last time I read it, but now think it's worth reading again from a different place of understanding. 

This Tender Land

This Tender Land is the story of two orphaned brothers, Odie and Albert, who are the only white kids at a boarding school for Native Americans in a small Minnesota town in 1932. Times are hard everywhere, but especially at the school, which is run by a cruel couple who think little of using their students in forced labor, barely feeding or clothing them. Odie in particular is willing the wrath of the school's leaders, getting himself into trouble again and again. But often, he's not getting into trouble for the sake of getting into trouble, but to stand up for himself or another student who can't. That's laudable, but one especially bad night, things get out of hand, and Odie and Albert, along with their Native friend Mose and Emmy, a young girl just orphaned herself. Their goal: Get to St. Louis, where Odie and Albert's aunt lives, or lived the last they knew. They take the canoe formerly owned by Emmy's mother, and off they go.

But they realize all too soon that the schoolmasters are determined to find them, and have the means to hire help in that regard. They also realize that there's something very different about Emmy.

I got sucked into this one hard and tore right through it. I wish I could say that I loved it. I loved maybe the first third or so, but then I began to have trouble suspending disbelief. The things that happened often felt forced rather than organic. Many of the characters felt two-dimensional, more there for type than to be real fleshed-out human beings. Some of the action felt repetitive. And finally, it's almost as if author Krueger had a list he wanted to tick off: Hmm, let's write about abuses at Native boarding schools, then about the 1862 Dakota War that led to 38 Natives hanged the day after Christmas, and the effects of the Depression, and the tent-pole evangelicals who thrived during that time, and anti-Semitism, and the history of the Irish in St. Paul, and lesbians, and...

Yeah. That's a lot for one book. It's not much of a spoiler to say that this book is supposed to be a Depression-era Odyssey, and I felt that angle was much too labored.

So, overall, not my favorite, even though parts are good, and the four main characters are fairly well drawn.

Mariette in Ecstasy

Mariette in Ecstasy is a spare, yet lyrical novel set in upstate New York, beginning in 1906. Mariette Baptiste is about to follow her older sister's footsteps and enter a convent, against the wishes of her widowed father. Mariette is beautiful and idealistic, but also deeply religious. When she enters the convent, there are immediately convent members who adore her, but also those who go the opposite way, as far as their faith will allow them.

Which complicates things when Mariette begins to experience religious ecstasy and shows signs of stigmata. Is it a miracle? Is she becoming one with Christ? Or is she an attention-seeking fraud? 

Hansen keeps an authorial distance that allows the reader to interpret as they wish. Is Mariette a con artist, or is she the real deal? He gives hints both ways, keeping the reader unsure.

And the writing is beautiful, with lovely little metaphors and similes that grace the pages: 

"Tallow candles in red glass jars shudder on a high altar."

"And when all the sisters have walked through and Sister Aimee has been excused, Mother Saint-Raphael installs a stool beside the headrail and with no more than a whisper of sound sits down beside Mariette and is as still as a picture for a while, as composed as a book of ritual, disarray's opposite."

A lovely, gentle book to start the year. 

This Is Happiness

This Is Happiness is the last book I completed in 2019, and what a way to end a year. This is one of those rare books that is slow in pacing, but I couldn't have cared less about that, so interested was I in the characters and the community so fully, richly, compassionately portrayed. And talk about gorgeous writing--I read the library's copy, so obviously wasn't going to write in it, but kept putting little flags at various points until I realized nearly every page had some writing that made me sigh in appreciation--and the great writing served the story itself, not detracting from it.

The story is simple: The narrator, Noel (or Noe, as he's called) is an orphan who has become disenchanted with the idea of becoming a priest. Writing from the vantage point of his elder years, Noe is recalling how at the age of 17, he's sent off to visit his grandparents in the western Irish town of Faha. Faha is on the verge, for better or worse, of getting electricity for the first time. As if that wasn't exciting enough, especially to young Noe, a man named Christy shows up unannounced and appears to be part of the move to bring electricity in. But it turns out Christy has more than one reason for wanting to come to Faha.

So it's a coming of age story told from the wry viewpoint of many years later, and it's a tale of love in its many forms. It's also very much a story of the town of Faha and its inhabitants, their quirks and their personal histories:

"Faha then had more to it too than it does now. The shops were small but there were more of them, grocers, butchers, hardware, draper, chemist and undertakers, each implacably marked by the character of their owners. You shopped by blood and tribe. If you were related, however thinly, to Clohessy, or Bourke, who both sold the same tea, flour and sugar, the same three vegetables and tins of imperishable foodstuffs, that's where you did your business. You didn't darken the door of the other."

And sometimes the beautiful writing is more philosophic:

"At the time you're living it you can sometimes think your life is nothing much. It's ordinary and everyday and should be and could be this or that way better. It is without the perspective by which any meaning can be derived because it's too sensual and urgent and immediate, which is the way life is to be lived. We're all, all the time, striving, and though that means there's a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it's not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There's something to consider in that."

On Goodreads, I said this was a book to wallow in. If you're in a wallowing mood, where you don't mind if the plot is slow to chug along but you're introduced to myriad fascinating characters and heaps of gorgeous writing, this one's for you.

 

American Wife

American Wife is a fictionalized account of the courtship and marriage of George W and Laura Bush. I'm not a fan of Dubya, but a friend said I might find this book interesting. And I did. I compared some of the events in the book to the real-life Laura (here called Alice, and the story is told first person from her point-of-view), and some are true. I hadn't realized that Laura had been in a car accident that led to the death of another driver. There are other aspects that are fictional in an "as far as we know" viewpoint, such as Alice having an abortion that leads her to be pro-choice later in life, even though her husband is a Republican. Laura Bush made public comments supporting choice, but as far as we know, did not have an abortion herself.

So author Sittenfeld raises some interesting questions that she explores deeply, such as how a liberal young woman in the 60s and 70s could end up married to a highly conservative man who goes on to become president and enter the country into a dubious (at best) war. This is all worthy of exploration. That said, I had some issues with the book. There's no question Sittenfeld is a talented writer (I loved her re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice in Eligible). But American Wife is bloated, full of unnecessary side trips and asides. Yet, astonishingly, I also feel that far too much was left out. We're given an in-depth exploration of Alice's youth, how she met her future husband, and their courtship and marriage up to the point where she leaves him because of his drinking, leading to his quitting drinking and finding God. 

But then, puzzlingly, she jumps to late in the president's administration when the Iraq War is in full swing and he's a lame-duck candidate. That final section of the book is the least satisfying. I wanted so much more about his political career and her response to it. We've been shown this woman who will stand up to her husband for what she thinks is right, removing herself and her then-young daughter from their home when her husband's drinking becomes problematic. Would that same woman just silently acquiesce to her husband's political leanings? Would she not speak up about the vice president's machinations? The careering from focusing in Afghanistan to invading Iraq? I find that hard to believe with the woman that Sittenfeld has carefully created and fleshed out. Skipping those years is an all-too-easy out. 

I finished the book and don't regret it, but I have to wonder if, a decade later, Sittenfeld wouldn't take a different approach. I guess we'll have a chance to see, as she's reportedly writing a novel about Hillary Clinton set in the time she met Bill Clinton. And yes, I'll read it.

Will and Testament

Will and Testament has a really intriguing premise. There's a battle going on among four siblings over two summer cabins owned by their parents, about to be handed down as inheritance. But the parents have unexpectedly given the cabins to the two youngest offspring, which raises eyebrows for obvious reasons. However, there's far more at play here than pettiness and favoritism. There's a family secret that's involved, one that blows up during the inheritance discussions and has reverberating consequences.

I wish I could say I loved this book. It raises lots of hard questions about family and what family members owe each other, and their parents. It also takes a long hard look at the debilitating consequences of childhood trauma. I mean, I did finish the book and don't feel bad or angry that I did, even though I gave it only 2 stars on Goodreads. It was worth finishing for me.

But in the end, the book's writing style hugely detracted from the book's effect. The author uses a highly repetitive writing style, repeating words and phrases, and long compound sentences with nearly endless numbers of clauses. I'm thinking that this may be the author's way of presenting post-traumatic stress disorder and how survivors have to repeatedly work through things before they can start to come to terms with them. But after a while that repetition feels overwritten and deadens the reader's response. Which is unfortunate in a book where there are so many raw, blistering emotions being explored.

Apparently the book caused quite a scandal in Norway when it was published, and one of the author's sisters actually wrote a rebuttal novel. But the author stands by her claim that it's a novel, something that feels a bit weird when so much of the book is an insistent refrain of "tell the truth and believe the truth-tellers!"

I read an earlier book of hers called A House in Norway, which I quite liked. I'll read others by her as they become available. But I might approach her with some distance on my end.

Two Old Women

I was reading a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides, and the two female main characters read and discussed a book called Two Old Women. I wondered if that was a real book, and lo and behold, it is. 

The book is based on an Athabascan Indian legend centered in the Yukon River Valley in Alaska. It's winter, and things are dire for the tribe. There's nowhere near enough food. Finally the chief makes a difficult decision: They are going to leave the two oldest women behind. This is not unheard of; the women aren't able to contribute anything, and even worse, they complain constantly about the hardships. The chief feels he has to preserve resources for those who might live longer and be able to actively help the others. So the two old women are left behind.

After a period of intense shock, the women began to talk about their fate--and decide to fight it. Better to die trying to live than just to passively die. And so they do.

This short book is a remarkable testimony to the human spirit, and part of what's so remarkable is that the two women aren't portrayed as tortured saints. They were whiny. And they're angry about this outcome. Part of their mode for going on is a kind of "We'll show them!" As they make it from day to day and revive their buried hunting and foraging skills, they also strengthen physically and emotionally. Yet their anger at being abandoned trails after them like a long shadow.

Such a good book. You can read it at a sitting or two. A great winter's tale.

Tornado Weather

Tornado Weather is a sprawling novel set mostly in Colliersville, IN, a smaller town where most people know each other, and many have opinions on the Mexicans brought in by a local dairy farm owner to try and increase his business. There are hostilities, and there's also a sense of confusion over Hector Gonzalez, a school teacher of Hispanic descent who suffered the tragedy of having his wife killed and his daughter, Daisy, end up in a wheelchair due to a horrendous accident. But as the book opens, things are about to get even worse for Hector: Daisy disappears one day after school.

Her disappearance, along with a massive tornado that does significant damage to Colliersville, affects many of the town's inhabitants, and this book is essentially a number of their stories. From Fikus, the school bus driver who let Daisy go unattended after she got off the bus, to Trevor, a medicated young man who can understand animals speaking to him and tries to warn people about the tornado that's coming, to the dairy farmer, his wife Birdy, and their son who identifies as female, to pole dancers at the local strip club, there are numerous points of view to consider. 

In fact, I'd say too numerous. It was hard at times to remember who was who, and some chapters felt unnecessary. I'd rather have focused on the core group affected by Daisy's disappearance.

That said, author Kennedy can write. This is her debut novel, and in spite of too much going on, the writing itself is very strong, and many of the characters are fully fleshed out, human and flawed, but still capable of gaining the reader's sympathy. She also makes the town into a character itself, as important as any of the characters. She's definitely a writer to watch.

Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes is a slow burn of a book, but worth every word. Set in Britain in the early 20th century, it tells the story of Laura Willowes, a young woman who never shows much interest in getting married--and isn't pushed into it by her parents. But when both parents are dead by the time she's 28, her prospects are not great. At that time, the only recourse she had was to move into with a sibling and his family, and end up, as often happened to spinsters then, acting as a long-term temporary worker, doing everything from arranging flowers to watching children to running errands.

Not the most delightful life occurrence.

Not surprisingly, Laura, who is soon called by the diminutive (in every meaning of the word) "Lolly" by everyone in the family, eventually reaches a point of dissatisfaction and longing for a life of her own, away from all these people. To the astonishment and dismay of her brothers and sisters-in-law, she takes the little income she has and escapes to a small, remote rural town where she rents rooms in a cottage and builds a life of her own choosing.

So much better, right? 

Until her once-beloved nephew decides it's a lifestyle that suits him too, and he comes to disrupt her hard-won solitude. 

That's when Lolly discovers she's made a deal with the devil. Literally.

I loved this book. As I said, it's a slow burn, taking its time, but the nonchalant narrative voice that details, quite humorously, Lolly's upbringing and family history, as well as the less-amusing slide into "helpful spinsterhood," are always entertaining and intriguing. The book is a subversively feminist tale, especially for its time, but a surprisingly moral one at the same time. Not to mention damning conventions that are upheld past the point of usefulness:

"[T]he Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behavior imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors."

I've not read Sylvia Townsend Warner before. This definitely won't be the only book of hers I'll read.