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| # | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
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| B00AB6BCFU
| 4.13
| 69
| unknown
| Nov 21, 2012
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After Mrs. Hamilton is Clare Ashton's second published novel, following Pennance. While the writing style is recognizably the same (only better!), the...more
After Mrs. Hamilton is Clare Ashton's second published novel, following Pennance. While the writing style is recognizably the same (only better!), the story here is of a very different type. Like some other reviewers, I found myself enjoying the more sophisticated style and story of AMH, while nevertheless feeling more emotionally involved in the earlier novel. But this book has some fascinating themes, and it's difficult for me to write a meaningful review without spoiling the clever plot twists. I have put this more detailed discussion at the end behind a Spoiler alert. The story has two main threads. In the first, Clo, a young woman rejected by her family, works as an escort for older female clients and finds herself attracted to, maybe even falling in love with one of them. In the second story, Laura, whose adoptive parents are dead, is trying to locate her biological family. During the course of her search, she meets Susan, a few years older, and there is an immediate connection between them. As in Pennance, Ashton presents readers with troubled characters, women who do not always accept their same-sex orientation and who have difficulties forming a genuine relationship of love. The age difference between Clo and her lover, as well as the woman's hidden identity, are more easily dealt with, while Laura and Susan must confront a serious taboo that will make some readers uncomfortable. One of Ashton's great strengths as a writer is her spare, unfussy style. In Pennance, I felt she had rushed to publication without the necessary smoothing, re- re-editing and proofreading. Here, the writing is more polished, and it's a pleasure to read for anyone like me whose eyes glaze over when lengthy descriptions, poetic "images" and other distractions get in the way of our quest: to read a story. There is no unnecessary verbiage, just the all-important movement of the story forward in short episodes that cut expertly between the two plots. Like Jane Austen, Ashton knows when to stop, leading her protagonists to the edge of resolution and letting readers imagine the rest. She feels no need to wallow in the tasty empty calories of conflict free, happily-ever-after scenes. On the negative side, the many characters, relatives and connections, especially in the Laura plot, were confusing. I did lose my way a few times among all the names, and had to go back to recall who was who, whose history involved which details, and so on. And it was, in a way, both irritating and inevitable at the end that almost everyone turned out to be connected to everyone else, in a cat's cradle kind of tangle that left my head spinning. So: four stars for an original story told in a clean, spare writing style. Readers may not approve of some of Ashton's choices for her characters, but they won't feel they've read this story a hundred times before. And, as a woman in my fifties, I was most appreciative of Ashton's recognition of the beauty to be found in a woman of a certain age. SPOILER ALERT below: The "taboo" subject is incest between sisters, and I thought this made for an unusual, nuanced romance. In a good romance novel, readers are (or should be) actively rooting for the protagonists to get together. Here, as readers begin to sense the nature of Laura and Susan's biological relationship, we have a more ambivalent feeling. It's to Ashton's credit that she handles it so well that by the end I was relieved to hear Clo's common-sense take on it: "... there's been no abuse ... You're both equals. And there's no reproduction, no risk of becoming pregnant ... So, why would it be so terrible?" Clo's attitude is borne out by anthropological studies. Siblings raised apart are more likely to feel sexual attraction for one another than biological strangers raised as siblings. It's the family upbringing that creates a sense of "incest," more than any subconscious awareness of shared genetics. I'm impressed at Ashton's decision not only to tackle this subject but to make it the main theme of a romance--and to hint at a happy ending. It reminded me of the recent BBC show "Call the Midwife," in which one of the later episodes featured a middle-aged brother/sister couple. Both stories force us to confront our own often irrational prejudices--and that's precisely what any kind of queer romance ought to be doing. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| May 11, 2013
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May 12, 2013
| Kindle Edition
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| 0805090037
| 9780805090031
| 4.28
| 14,028
| 2012
| May 08, 2012
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This is not exactly a book review; it's a blog post on my recent "Tudor binge," for which I apologize. As you'll see, my reaction to this book is inex...more This is not exactly a book review; it's a blog post on my recent "Tudor binge," for which I apologize. As you'll see, my reaction to this book is inextricably entangled with my feelings about the historical events it covers, and my concurrent wallow in the TV series The Tudors, as well as other recent events. I finished reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second book in Hilary Mantel's planned trilogy about Henry VIII and his crew as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, two days after our book club's discussion. Now I'm reeling from self-imposed Tudor overload. Wanting to know more about the standard interpretation of Cromwell and his character (as opposed to Mantel's partisan approach), I started with Wikipedia. But I also needed my regular nightly fix of TV, and what more logical than The Tudors, the over-the-top (and I don't just mean breasts spilling out of tight bodices) cable series starring the acting world's physical antithesis of Henry, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, four seasons ready for binge-streaming on Netflix. And to put the cherry on this sex-and-violence sundae, in the midst of all this, the skeleton of Richard III was dug up under a parking lot (in the R section, no less) and determined through mitochondrial DNA (inherited through the maternal line and matched with descendants of his sister Anne) to be his. We're still waiting for confirmation from the paternal line, but that seems almost superfluous, given the fantastic curvature of the spine from scoliosis. So what did I get from this massive wallow, besides a deep and heartfelt gratitude for having been born five hundred years later, in another country? Well, let's start with the book. Most of us in the book club liked Bodies better than Wolf Hall. It's shorter and there's more of a plot. You don't have to read two hundred pages before you feel that things are actually happening. Mantel cleaned up the "he, Cromwell" problem, making it much easier to know who "he" is throughout. Some of us felt that it was a lot like reading a police procedural, a weird one, in which the detective and prosecuting attorneys must manufacture a case out of nothing, yet still adhere to laws of evidence and testimony. And, of course, this is why some didn't like it: it's depressing to see the talents of a brilliant, self-taught, pragmatic and supremely competent man like Cromwell wasted on the contrived destruction of a woman guilty only of giving birth to a girl, suffering two unwelcome miscarriages and of growing older, as well as that of the woman's brother and four other men guilty of--being there, I guess, flirtatious and ambitious, the coterie of moths that any fascinating woman will attract. As a writer, my Holy Grail of fiction is finding the literary equivalent of the opera singer who can "sing the phone book," writers whose style is so compellingly readable that anything they write about is interesting; writers whose books I'll read regardless of their chosen subject matter. For me, Jonathan Franzen is that kind of writer. When people ask what his book Freedom is "about," I say, "I don't know, ordinary people. It's how he writes that makes them interesting." I was drawn into Freedom from the first sentence, and when the 600+ pages were over I wished there were 600 more. So the reason I chose Mantel's first novel for the group was the mainstream critics' excitement over her style, how she wrote a historical novel without resorting to archaic language while still anchoring her story in an authentic-feeling past. My interest in rehashing Henry-Anne Boleyn, six wives, blah blah blah, is close to nil at this point. But it's impossible to read a historical novel without becoming absorbed by (or bogging down in) the facts. Did they "really" do that? Did that "really" happen? Why or why not? Was Henry just an asshole or did he have valid reasons for what to us appears to be monstrous selfishness and cruelty? One problem with Mantel's approach, turning Henry's enforcer, Cromwell, into a likeable character, is that many of us balk (like my blog friend gaedhal). We just can't see it that way, no matter how good a writer Mantel is. For me, this aspect of the story was less problematic. I'm willing to suspend disbelief up to a point, accepting Cromwell as a human being, not a monster: a man of multiple talents and great ambition, which bring him to the court of an absolute monarch. If Cromwell is to continue to thrive, he must figure out what Henry VIII wants and make it happen--quickly and without noise. Old new wife becoming tiresome? Ready for a new new wife? Anne Boleyn must be disappeared and Jane Seymour brought in in her place. I did think Mantel stretched a bit, though. I was suspicious of the conversation between Cromwell and a churchman, in which rumors of Anne Boleyn's use of "sorcery" are treated with what seems a very modern skepticism and distaste. Could men of that time truly be so sensible on the subject? And I especially wondered at Mantel's version of what for most of us is the worst aspect of this whole sordid business: torture. In the traditional narrative, the musician, Mark Smeaton, the only one of the five murdered (excuse me, executed) men who was not a gentleman, was tortured. It's his "confession" that starts the whole horrible avalanche of a "trial" rolling. Mantel writes a humorous scene in which Smeaton, after being interviewed in Cromwell's house, is locked, not in a torture chamber, but in a closet containing props and costumes left over from family Christmas pageants. For someone anticipating the worst, the encounters in the dark with the sharp points of a metal and glass star and with the disembodied peacock feathers of angel's wings are as terrifying as the sight of the rack. Out pours a catalog of wild confabulations. I thought the concept was clever, but I didn't really buy it. The episode was creepy in some way it's hard to define; Mantel obviously shares her protagonist's contempt for this indiscreet and immature young man. According to Wikipedia, the source for the idea that Smeaton was tortured is the "usually unreliable Spanish Chronicles." Accounts of his execution say that he was "led" to the scaffold and "stumbled back" at the sight of the blood, actions impossible if he had been disjointed on the rack. It looks as if Mantel, whatever her lighthearted approach to "torture," is correct on the facts. The TV show provided a welcome contrast, emotional and sensual, to Mantel's more cerebral account. It was in many ways much better than I expected. Content heavy on sex and violence does not require that the script be badly written, and I found most of the episodes engaging and informative. While the series took some liberties, I found it to be an excellent tutorial or introduction. One good example is its depiction of Henry's change in character, which occurred shortly after his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Henry suffered several serious injuries from his favorite pastime of jousting. After the worst, he was unconscious for two hours. (Nowadays, four minutes is the upper limit before we worry about brain damage.) Mantel does a brilliant job with this scene, showing the Boleyn family's careful watchfulness, controlling their fervent wishes for Henry's demise and their disappointment when Cromwell arrives, preventing chaos and ensuring that Henry receives medical attention--and wakes up. But Mantel's entire saga is limited to the years of Cromwell's ascendancy. The TV show, which follows Henry over decades, made it clearer to modern viewers that the king, who has the power of life and death over everybody in England, including his own children and his ex-wives, has changed from a genial, friendly "bluff King Hal" into a paranoid, suspicious, resentful man, from the 16th-century equivalent of too many years playing football without a helmet. Repeated sepsis from an unhealed leg wound exacerbated by tight garters, and weight gain from enforced physical inactivity (it's estimated that Henry weighed close to 400 pounds at his death), could only have speeded up the process of a temperament morphing from happy and light, if dangerous with unrestricted power, to very dark indeed, Ultimately, with both book and TV series, my reactions centered more on the events themselves than on the style of the telling. Henry VIII's reign is the prime example of good things happening for the wrong reasons, the reverse of the more usual case of good intentions leading to bad results. Despite all the horror, two very good things came from Henry VIII: the Church of England and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth should need no defending, but those of you who know me will laugh at an atheist endorsing the C of E, especially as it's going through a rough patch these days. Now that civilized people can't take religion seriously, the C of E is being eaten alive by its evangelical adherents, consumed and shat out as the old style fire-and-brimstone garbage it was created to be the antidote for, with no recognition of same-sex marriage or even the ordination of women bishops. I mourn the faith of Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson (I know, I know, but I can't help having affection for the man who took a pair of scissors to the New Testament and cut out all the supernatural bits, leaving the teachings of Jesus unsullied by occultism); the church of P. G. Wodehouse and his Drones Club gadabout young men betting on the length of sermons. This truly is part of what made the British Empire great, and it's a sad thing to see it devolve into an ossified Catholic lite. But none of this would have happened if Henry hadn't been "a bloody babyish bastard who wanted what he wanted until he didn't want it anymore and then he destroyed it," as gaedhal says. Henry wanted a divorce from his first wife and he made himself head of the Church of England in order to get it, thereby freeing England from the pope. The objection that Henry was now an absolute monarch with no one above him to check his power can be answered in one word: Parliament. If there's any doubt, look at the sorry record of the modern papacy and the Roman Catholic Church. Counterbalancing absolutism at home with corruption and cynicism abroad is not the way to modern government. Like any communist hoping that things will get worse and lead to revolution, so, ultimately, I welcome Henry's absolutism. It led, eventually, to the Civil Wars of the 1600s that, in the name of Parliament, deposed and executed a monarch a good century or more before any other European country--or America--even thought about such things. If Mantel's books or TV's bonkbuster series lead people to think about any of this, that's a good thing. And even if all we do is read for style, or enjoy the sight of those heaving bosoms, it's still something worth seeing or reading: the perverse, ridiculous and petty motives that sometimes result in unintended and unlooked-for great consequences. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Feb 15, 2013
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Feb 25, 2013
| Hardcover
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| 9780007230204
| 3.82
| 40,885
| 2009
| 2010
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Rating and reviewing a book like Wolf Hall is a challenge on many levels. It's serious historical fiction written by an intelligent, talented author,...more
Rating and reviewing a book like Wolf Hall is a challenge on many levels. It's serious historical fiction written by an intelligent, talented author, about a well-known period of English history (Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, divorce, male heir, rise of Protestantism, break with Rome) as told by a relatively unfamiliar main character, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief minister and, as we might think of him, "enforcer." There's an excellent, lengthy, substantive review by "~Geektastic~" just a couple of reviews below mine that lays out all the historical background and discusses the novel in terms of historical accuracy and character development. It's pointless for me to rehash such a masterly job, so in my "review" I will focus on one controversial aspect of Hilary Mantel's work: the narrative style. As most people know by now, Mantel uses a strange mix of first-person point of view and third-person narrative. Cromwell tells us the story, but refers to himself as "he." All other male characters are necessarily also "he," and there are times, especially during dialog among more than two characters, when it is not clear who "he" is. Occasionally Mantel helps us out by having her narrator say "he, Cromwell." How a reader reacts to this experiment is probably a matter of temperament and mood. Because I had read so many rave reviews by mainstream critics, all of which mentioned this issue, I was prepared for it but still had moments of confusion. Eventually I decided that if I read a passage three times and still couldn't figure it out, I would just move on. If I had come to the book with no expectations, I would have been flummoxed at the beginning and might very well not have persevered. Most of the other people in my reading group had a similar reaction. But we all enjoyed the book and some of us would undoubtedly give it a full five stars. (And we have chosen the second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, for our next read.) So why did Mantel do this? My theory is based on the quality of the book that was universally praised: its language that is neither faux-archaic nor anachronistically modern. I'm guessing that, in trying to give readers a sense of the harsh, dangerous and uncomfortable world of 500 years ago, rather than rely on "thee" and "thou" and a whole (Oxford English) dictionary of words that are no longer in use or mean something completely different, Mantel decided to try this universal "he" to make us sit up and pay attention. At least that's the effect it had on me. I could never just relax into the story to the point of having that amazing out of body experience, the reason I became addicted to fiction as a child. I did become absorbed in the story, but rating it as a drug high, compared to the pure heroin of the best conventionally written novels it was more like tonic water without the gin, or perhaps a hit off a stale joint that's been in someone's back pocket for two years. That's why I'm giving this book four stars, not five. It's a personal thing, as all these Goodreads reviews are. Those stars don't reflect absolute merit but only what we "like"—or don't. Of course I'm not saying that Hilary Mantel isn't a great writer or that her (re)created world of 1530s England isn't brilliantly researched and constructed. It's just not exactly like reading a modern novel. And I'm sure that's what Mantel wanted to achieve: as one of my group members said, she always felt like an observer of the story, never completely in the world, the way we are with other great novels. Before I quit, I want to mention the unavoidable issue of taking sides. Even though we know how the history comes out (or should do, after so many books and movies and TV shows) it's hard to read about these famous events and not root for someone: Katherine, Henry's wronged first wife and their one surviving child, Princess Mary, or Anne Boleyn, the arrogant, scheming, French-educated seductress who held out for marriage rather than become just one more mistress and mother of a royal bastard; Sir Thomas More, who went to the tower and the scaffold rather than condone Henry's actions, and who stayed true to the Roman Catholic faith, or Thomas Cromwell himself who, while sympathetic to Katherine and Mary, favored Protestantism on the merits and implemented Henry's wishes as the means of rising to his own position of power and influence, and so on and on. I can't imagine telling this story and not having strong opinions, especially after immersing oneself in the primary sources, coming to see all these people as … people and developing feelings for them. Mantel does a good job of matching her sympathies with those of her main character, letting us absorb Cromwell's outlook as he learns the facts and understands the various situations. Choosing such a tough, intelligent, self-educated man to be her narrator is a clever way to bring us up to speed. All the major players in this drama are unlikeable, and Mantel makes us acutely aware of the caprice and cruelty behind so many fateful decisions. But I'm not going to hedge: being safely five hundred years removed from any consequences, I can say that I adore Anne Boleyn (what, you thought "arrogant and scheming" were pejoratives? This is me, Ann Herendeen, speaking) and grateful that her daughter survived to become England's greatest monarch. When I read Mantel's harsh portrayal of Anne, and know what's coming in the next installment of this bloody saga, I cringe. But I wonder how much is Mantel's genuine dislike for this brave, tough adventuress, and how much is her authorial imagining of how Cromwell saw her and her "ginger pig" of an infant daughter. One result of all this repulsiveness at the top of society is to increase the reader's distance from the story. And in ending this "review" (or whatever it is) I want to mention two places where I felt deeply moved, places in which Mantel broke through the artifice of the universal "he" and allowed genuine human emotions to flow. In the first we see Anne after Elizabeth's birth, bearing up bravely as Henry and the court absorb the unpalatable fact of the child's sex. As Anne shows her baby off to the court, the baby cries. And for the only time in the entire book, Anne reveals an unguarded, authentic feeling of love. "Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down toward her daughter, but at once women swoop … the screaming creature is … swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits" (p. 458). The second instance occurs as a gentle young scholar named John Frith is burned alive, for heresy, under Thomas More's direction. On the day, Cromwell is out hunting with the king. "Henry, laughing, spurs away his hunter under the dripping trees. At Smithfield, Frith is bring shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone" (p. 445). These unexpected moments made me understand that if the whole book had been like this it would have been unendurable. The sixteenth century, like so much of the past, seems horrific to us, with dirt, disease and torture part of daily life. We couldn't withstand total immersion in that world, and Hilary Mantel, in her compassion, instead gave us only so much reality as she thought we could tolerate. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| Nov 23, 2012
| Jan 12, 2013
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Nov 18, 2012
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| B009VJ182K
| 4.80
| 5
| Oct 23, 2012
| Oct 23, 2012
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Picaresque Romantic Romp The Blondness of Honey (one of the all-time great titles, with a gorgeous cover to match) is a lesbian romance as promised, bu...more Picaresque Romantic Romp The Blondness of Honey (one of the all-time great titles, with a gorgeous cover to match) is a lesbian romance as promised, but it's also several other stories as well. And that's a good thing! Not that there's anything wrong with "just" a romance; only that, at close to 400 pages, Blondness has many plot threads spinning merrily along. Author T.T. Thomas has a lot of tales to tell, and she apparently tried to cram all of them into one big book. Fortunately, she took one or two of them out (for example, there are only a couple of excerpts left of a novel within the novel) or we'd never reach the end—and our minds would be mush when we got there. The story begins in upscale California ca. 1890 as we meet heroine Laura Hastings and her beloved, Catherine Chadwick. The two young women's idyllic summer of love is soon to be spoiled, in best romance-novel fashion, by a villain, in this case a man, Augur Lazenby, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. But he does serve a purpose: he's a reminder that, until recently, men and women who wanted children and a family saw no other way to get them than through heterosexual marriage, whatever their emotional and physical inclinations. Catherine is no exception. But then, instead of taking us in the expected direction, in search of lost love, Thomas sends her heroine abroad to find herself among the artistic, European lesbian communities of Rome, Paris and London. And when Laura and readers return to America, we meet yet another love interest, the beautiful and intelligent Rachel Delacourt, a gifted teacher. Heavens! Shortly after that, we meet the very pretty, heterosexual Lilly George. Oh my! And we follow a fascinating, improbable, but who-cares-I'm-having-too-much-fun story that is part coming of age and quite a lot picaresque, as strangers on a train trade places and cousins who aren't really cousins fall in love. We meet Jane Addams of Hull House and go to the Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair) of 1893. The style is a bit unsophisticated for my taste, which is only to say that I prefer the more polished, concise T.T. Thomas of her short stories like "The Guy in Frankie's Hatbox" and "Ronald Debby" (also available as part of the series "Sex On a Regular Basis"--read it, it's terrific). But the breathless, slightly unfocused style suits this nonstop romp across late-nineteenth-century America. It reminds me a little of Louisa May Alcott's "sensational" adventure stories, a resemblance that is perhaps not coincidental. This is not "literary" fiction but genre--the stuff we want to read, not the stuff we struggle through because it's good for us. This is a ripe, juicy peach or a strawberry, not celery. And yes, if you sense a double entendre here, you're right. This is "women's fiction," in several meanings of that term. Thomas is at her best (aren't we all?) when she restrains her wordiness and keeps her scenes short and humorous. I laughed out loud, literally, when Laura and Catherine are about to make love outdoors. "What about snakes?" Catherine asks, to which Laura replies, "Oh, they've seen it all." Another happy moment occurs during a formal dinner when the twelve-year-old daughter of the house quotes from Little Women: "Housekeeping ain't no joke." As in her novella Two Weeks at Gay Banana Hot Springs, Thomas has a talent for evoking the spirit of California. I don't mean boring descriptions of scenery but a mood, a way of existence. In Blondness, Thomas combines this western flavor with the exuberance of a young country celebrating its achievements, testing its strength and ready to tackle any problem with a fresh eye, from alleviating poverty to inventing better office equipment. Never have the typewriter and paper clips seemed so exciting. It's standard in stories of same-sex love for the protagonists to face parental disapproval and rejection, and while we do get some of that, it struck me as original and right that Laura has two loving parents who know their daughter, and accept her and love her as she is. Even Catherine and Rachel's parents come around in the end and stand by their unconventional daughters. It's a welcome and necessary reminder that there have always been some good parents, and that California, a land of golden opportunity, might have had more than its fair share. The portrayal of most of the male characters as decent, kind people, learning to recognize the "Sapphists" among their sisters and daughters, but not judging, also contributes to the warm atmosphere. This is a romance, so it must end happily. There are only a couple of steamy love scenes, and the level of spiciness felt just right for a story populated by proper young ladies. The final scene has one of the most suggestive and poetic phrases I have ever read to describe the way in which a lady can make love to another. I won't ruin it by quoting it here, any more than I'll spoil the story by revealing who ends up with whom. Read it and find out for yourself. (less) | Notes are private!
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1
| not set
| Nov 17, 2012
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Nov 18, 2012
| Kindle Edition
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| 0156509814
| 9780156509817
| 3.48
| 346
| 1984
| Apr 01, 1986
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"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more...more
"Alice" is a fictional character, the author, Fay Weldon, signs her letters to this nonexistent niece "your aunt Fay" and most of the book reads more like essays than a novel. Sounds ghastly, right? It probably is if you read it at the wrong moment. Like many people who loved this book, I received it as a gift, put it aside, and then started reading one day when I was in the right mood. And BAM! I was hooked and read this short piece in an afternoon (127 pages in this edition). It definitely helps to like Jane Austen; it's hard to imagine someone who hasn't read Austen or doesn't like her work enjoying this book. Most of the "story" consists of Aunt Fay "explaining" Austen's life and times to her niece, a young woman of eighteen who has dyed her hair punkette style (the book was first published in 1984) and who has to read Austen for school--and isn't looking forward to it. The conceit is cleverer than it sounds, and there's a neat twist at the end. Fay delivers some lofty and, for some readers, pretentious-sounding passages on the meaning of Great Literature, while discouraging her niece from writing a novel before she has had anything in the way of a life. But the real meat of this work is the discussion of Austen as a person and a writer who lived in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the first two decades of the nineteenth as an Anglican clergyman's daughter in village England. As Weldon (or Aunt Fay) describes it, all these facts are inseparable, and essential, in understanding Austen's work. And if you aren't familiar with the horrible realities of that time and place, even for a middle-class woman (as best we can define Austen's level for today's world), then you lack the necessary background to appreciate her fiction--and you will be troubled by all those questions whose answers elude junior-high school students: Why didn't "they" (Austen, her sister, her fictional characters, middle- and upper-class women in general) just "get a job" instead of remaining trapped in shabby-genteel poverty? Why does Austen almost never refer to current events, among the most dramatic in English history (the Napoleonic Wars, great stuff!)? Why does she not describe all those peculiar articles of clothing that we would like to visualize, or elaborate on all those bizarre two-hundred-year-old customs? And why would anyone willingly marry Mr. Collins? For someone like me, who spent years immersed in Pride and Prejudice and who has spent even longer than that reading and thinking about Austen as a person, woman and writer, reading this book was like an alcoholic's finding a case of Jack Daniel's outside the kitchen door. I was flabbergasted as Weldon put forward every last one of what I thought were my unique opinions about Austen and her works and times. The obvious explanation is that my opinions aren't unique or even all that unusual, but even among my fellow Janeites I often feel alone in my outlook. Seeing my ideas laid out one after the other and presented as Gospel--bam bam BAM BAM BAM--was, let us say, highly addictive. Many readers who love this book cite the "City of Invention," Weldon's beautifully-imagined metropolis of all the lasting literary works, with the reeking slums of porn huddled somewhere near the docks and the prefabricated suburbs of genres like romance and mystery rising far too quickly on the outskirts. It is a nice metaphor, but it's also fair to say that times have changed. We feel very differently now about porn and genre fiction than we did almost thirty years ago. Not only do many more of us read and write it unashamedly, but the idea of a strict division between Literary and Genre is as dated for many of us as "separate but equal" as a sound basis for a public school system. And when Aunt Fay starts railing against "word processors" and decrees that longhand is the only way to write fiction ... oh, please! No, the stuff that makes me want to run down the street waving this book and shouting "Read this now!" is the wealth of insight about Austen. I could fill this generous review space several times over with my favorite quotes, but I will have to content myself with picking out two or three of Weldon's major themes. First: her discussion of fiction as different from, and superior to, nonfiction. It "rais[es] invention above description" (p. 52). Almost anyone can be taught to write a detailed, accurate description. The genius of fiction is the author's imagination (thus the literary "City of Invention"). Weldon rejects the well-worn advice always to "write what you know," seeing it as the source of Austen's duller passages when she followed it too faithfully. "Fiction, thank God, is not and need not be reality" (p. 32). "Novels are not meant to be diaries" (p. 90). "You do not read novels for information but for enlightenment" (p. 29). Second: Weldon's feminism, beginning with her accounts in the early letters of the harshness of women's lives at that time, especially the dangers they faced from constant childbearing in a world without modern medicine or access to birth control. She takes "a tender view of Mrs. Bennet" of Pride and Prejudice, with her five unmarried daughters, saying that "Women were born poor, and stayed poor, and lived well only by their husbands' favour." "Enough to give anyone the vapours!" (p. 27) Weldon's assessment of Mr. Bennet ("callous and egocentric," p. 109) and Mr. Woodhouse of Emma ("irritating, difficult and hypochondriacal," p. 80) is refreshingly harsh and accurate, even if not necessarily the way Austen meant us to see them, characters who may have been based on her own beloved father. As in her sympathetic attitude toward Mrs. Bennet ("tenderer than her creator's"), Weldon is "looking at [Austen's world] from the outside in, not the inside out" (p. 30). "Austen's books are studded with [examples of] male whims taking priority ... over female happiness," says Weldon. "[Austen] does not condemn. She chides women for their raging vanity, their infinite capacity for self-deception, their rapaciousness and folly; men, on the whole, she simply accepts" (p. 19-20). Weldon finds examples in the Austen family history that reflect the way of that world, that "when a man has a principle, a woman pays for it," as when one of Austen's aunts was accused of shoplifting and her husband refused to buy the shopkeeper off, insisting on a trial. "He believes in honour; she stays in prison" (p. 94). Finally, there is the most fascinating argument of all, one that explores ideas I have been wrestling with literally for years: whether Austen was truly "good," really accepted the morality of her times, or simply had her spirit crushed. Austen lived her forty-one years as a dutiful spinster daughter, at home with her (eventually) widowed mother and fellow-spinster sister, never allowed to achieve independent adulthood. Did she embrace this restricted existence happily and cheerfully because she believed it in her heart to be right and just? Or did she bow to necessity, accepting defeat with the good manners her society required of women? I disagree with Weldon's idea that Austen brought on the Addison's disease that killed her as a sort of auto-immune response to frustration and years of repressed anger. Claire Tomalin's biography has established the most likely cause as tuberculosis caught by nursing one of her brothers. But apart from psychobabble, there is a real sense in the arc of Austen's life and career of a brilliant, fierce, angry rebel caught, beaten down and stifled into docility. Weldon suggests that there was another reason besides the obvious financial one that Austen never married: that in the woman and the writer there was a "ripple of merriment, this underground hilarity" and that "something truly frightening rumbled there beneath the bubbling mirth." "She knew too much … for her own good" (p. 97-98). Weldon presents an interesting theory in her interpretation of Mansfield Park, the first book Austen wrote after the death of her father. In the contrast between the "unspeakably good" heroine, Fanny Price, and the "witty, lively, and selfish" Mary Crawford, Weldon suggests that Austen was working out her own internal struggle between her "good" and "bad" sides that was "never quite reconciled." The "rebellious spirit" in Austen learned the "defences of wit and style" like Mary, while the "dutiful side accept[ed] authority, endur[ed] everything with a sweet smile and [found] her defence in wisdom" (p. 109). William Deresiewicz, in his book A Jane Austen Education (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), accepts the dutiful Austen as the real one, the "good" side her only side. "Usefulness and kindness," he says, "those same standards of decency she had championed in Mansfield Park … mattered to her more than all the wit in the world" (p. 192). But this, I am convinced, is a man's view, even two hundred years later still preferring what Virginia Woolf called the "Angel in the House," "utterly unselfish," "sacrificed herself daily," "never had a mind or a wish of her own" (p. 22), to the uncomfortable reality of a genius in a woman's body. Like Weldon, I say an emphatic No! to so depressing a view. That wit is too ferocious and too powerful, too great a triumph of art and inspiration to be discarded so casually. Weldon reminds us of "Lady Susan," Austen's unpublished epistolary novella, in which a thoroughly "wicked woman" romps through genteel society but is never punished as fictional morality demands (p. 85). It's unlikely that Austen's family approved of "Lady Susan;" certainly Austen's father never tried to have it published as he had Pride and Prejudice. "If it's approval you want, don't be a writer," Aunt Fay warns her niece (p. 112); earlier she has said that "A writer writes opaquely to keep some readers out, let others in. It is what he or she meant to do. It is not accidental - obscurity of language, inconsistency of thought ... it's not for everyone, it was never meant to be" (p. 106). Rather than believe in a Jane Austen who rejected her greatest gifts in favor of a dubious piety, I accept Aunt Fay's version: "I think indeed she bowed her will and humbled her soul, and bravely kept her composure ... and escaped into the alternative worlds of her novels ... and her self-discipline was so secure [that] she brought into that inventive world sufficient of the reality of the one we know and think we love, but which I think she hated, to make those novels outrun the generations" (p. 40, emphasis mine). Anyone who loves Jane Austen's work and has wondered what the person was really like, or why she wrote what she wrote, should not miss this book. Whether or not you agree with all of "Aunt Fay" 's conclusions, you will be left with some excellent food for thought--or, if you prefer, several cases of superior bourbon. (less) | Notes are private!
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Nov 09, 2012
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The House of Mirth, published in 1905, is Edith Wharton's first major work of fiction, and it established her reputation as a brilliant novelist and h...more
The House of Mirth, published in 1905, is Edith Wharton's first major work of fiction, and it established her reputation as a brilliant novelist and harsh critic of her society. Because I came to it after reading The Age of Innocence, which shows Wharton at the height of her power, I can't help giving Mirth four stars, where Innocence rated five. Mirth is an excellent novel, finely crafted, beautifully written and alive with Wharton's darkly humorous outlook. Wharton writes of the world she lived in, among the wealthy elite of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City, and her characters are frighteningly real: flawed and damaged, the best of them sometimes unsure how to act or whom to trust, and the worst... Oh God, the worst of them are as unspeakably horrible as the idle rich of any time and place. So why the lower rating? Mirth is, for me, the lesser work because of its extremes. Where Innocence relied on a more nuanced look at its characters and central situation, Mirth follows the formula of many writers' early works, with too much "goodness" on the side of its protagonist, and too much unrelieved wickedness on the other side. Lily Bart, the unmarried, beautiful, twenty-nine-year-old woman at the center of the story, who has been brought up to be merely an "ornament" in her world, not a worker or contributor, is emotionally incapable of marrying without love or, as the story progresses, unwilling to sink to the level of her abusers, to use blackmail to regain her lost position in the world. The degree to which she grows in self-knowledge is remarkable, and her ethical restraint, while suffering the worst reversals of poverty and ostracism, is not always believable. Part of what made Innocence such an enjoyable story was its "historical" aspect, the way Wharton contrasted the limited, blinkered world of the 1870s with the freer, more sophisticated world of 1900, when that story ends. In Mirth, we see the other side of that "modern" freedom, and what it means for women who are alone in the world, without family or close friends to protect or guide them. For Lily, it's an unrelenting downward spiral, and it's a heartbreaking read. I've noticed, as often with stories like this, some readers' contempt for Lily as someone who makes "stupid" choices. And I've often wondered what makes these readers think they would have done any better, assuming they were products of that same time and place, and did not have their hundred-years' worth of twenty-twenty hindsight. For me, my sympathy for Lily makes reading about her downfall too painful to be enjoyable, despite Wharton's engaging writing style. Lily sabotages all her near successes, precisely because she has too much intelligence and "sensibility," in the Jane Austen meaning, to marry without love, to spend the next forty years tied to a man she can't respect. The comparison with Austen is apt, because Wharton's writing is Austen without the gloss of two centuries of cultural change, the separation of the Atlantic Ocean, or a "quaint" country setting. It's New York City, not Netherfield, and it has this city's unabashed brutality. I was astonished at how similar the NYC of 1900 was to the city I grew up in and still inhabit. Austen's world is every bit as tough, but we don't always see it, because we're too easily lulled by her elegant, eighteenth-century manner to feel the stiletto blade until it pierces our heart. Wharton carries her cavalry saber unconcealed, and we (at least I do) sometimes shrink from its slashing force, dreading the inevitable bloody end. As Lily destroys one chance after another for herself, I found myself wishing that she would use the means at hand to defeat or at least control her female enemy, and not worry about hurting the man she loves in the process. In Wharton's world, as in Austen's, it's the women who pay the price for sexual indiscretions, gambling losses and other misbehavior, no matter who commits the actual sins. When one minor character, a silly young man, gambles away his fortune, it's his two unmarried sisters who are reduced to shabby spinsterhood, trying to earn a living, a mode of existence for which they are woefully unprepared. "Miss Jane reads aloud very nicely--but it's so hard to find anyone who is willing to be read to." Wharton writes with the kind of magical style that draws a reader in no matter what. Even if we know the story from having seen the movie version(s); even if we aren't happy about how it ends; even if we find some of the extreme duality of good and bad characters a little tedious--still, we want to spend time with this narrator. Like Jonathan Franzen, another author with this specific talent, Wharton can tell us any story she chooses, about any characters, and most readers will only say, "More, please." On that level alone, Wharton's work deserves five stars, but what I'm doing here is ranking her against herself, not everybody else. At the end of The Age of Innocence, I felt that it was a perfect work of art, the final scenes just right; a somewhat ambiguous, sad but not tragic ending that was the only acceptable resolution for the main characters. Mirth, by contrast, leaves most readers dissatisfied. "No," we think, "that can't be right." It's an argument in Wharton's favor that her ending is in many ways more realistic than the happier one most of us wish for. People do kill themselves, not literally by suicide, but by making one misstep after another, until they reach a place where death is the only possibility. Wharton's only "mistake" is in allowing us to see each of her heroine's missteps all too clearly, and with no way of turning her in a different direction. Perhaps this book deserves five stars after all. (less) | Notes are private!
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Venetia is one of Heyer's later works, originally published in 1958, and Heyer is clearly at the top of her game, writing well-developed characters in...more
Venetia is one of Heyer's later works, originally published in 1958, and Heyer is clearly at the top of her game, writing well-developed characters in a mature and emotionally satisfying love story. Venetia Lanyon is "on the shelf without ever having been off," as she puts it. At twenty-five, she's close to being an old maid, and without having enjoyed so much as one London season. The hero, the rakish Lord Damerel, is quite a bit older--thirty-eight--tall and athletic, but not especially handsome, his face lined from years of dissipation. Unlike many of Heyer's (and other author's) romances, which use the "hate at first sight" plot to create ongoing sexual tension through misunderstandings and verbal fights, only to be resolved on the last page, in Venetia the couple enjoy a genuine friendship almost from the start. After the obligatory forced kiss has been gotten out of the way, the two recognize in each other kindred spirits: intelligent, well-read people who get each other's jokes. For the first time in her life, Venetia has found someone besides her younger brother who isn't shocked or baffled by her tendency to speak honestly. What Venetia most treasures in her new-found friend is that he's someone she can laugh with. Another appealing aspect of the story is the heroine's independence. With both parents dead and her adult brother overseas in the aftermath of Napoleaon's defeat, Venetia has been running the household for years. At her "advanced" age and living in the country among a small group of families that all know each other, she enjoys an unusual degree of freedom. True, Venetia's situation is atypical for her time and place, but it makes the story more enjoyable for modern readers. Venetia may regret her lost London seasons and wish for a larger circle of acquaintance from which to choose a husband, but she does have choices, and she's not poor, either in money or in spirit. A recurring theme in Heyer's works is the uncomfortable fact of men's inability to adhere to strict, literal monogamy. Many of her novels show middle-aged couples in enduring, happy or at least comfortable marriages, in which the husband has been known to "stray" but remains emotionally faithful to his wife. Rarely is this idea applied so explicitly to the couple at the center of a romance novel, and it makes for a somewhat different kind of love story. The "ick factor" that the only one-star review on Amazon mentions is not quite as "icky" as the reviewer states, but it *is* there. If you read Heyer expecting twenty-first century gender equality you will be outraged or disappointed; if you read her romances for their unique mood, witty dialog and brilliant comedy, Venetia will provide all that plus something a little "off" that, to me and, I think, other sophisticated readers, gives what could be an overly sweet confection a much-welcome edge. Not wanting to spoil the story, I will say that the facts of women's as well as men's difficulties with monogamy are acknowledged without tears in Venetia. Heyer treats female "rakes" with refreshing sympathy and understanding. Her attitude seems to be that all sexy, intelligent men are potential rakes, while only some women are. The problem, of course, is that Venetia, as an intelligent, beautiful woman, requires a superior man for her husband, and he will therefore necessarily be a rake. Reformation is possible; changing human, masculine nature is not. Venetia, the heroine, resolves this problem with her usual honest, humorous acceptance. I recommend this book enthusiastically to all Heyer fans and potential fans, and especially to those readers who like a romance that makes you want to argue with the author and her characters, not in anger but with love. "Yes, but..." I want to say, and wish I could hear Heyer's answers, expressed through Damerel's and Venetia's words. Read it and create your own mental Q&A.(less) | Notes are private!
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I had not heard of Penelope Fitzgerald (freely confessing my appalling American ignorance here) when I started reading The Golden Child. It took me a...more
I had not heard of Penelope Fitzgerald (freely confessing my appalling American ignorance here) when I started reading The Golden Child. It took me a while to "understand" what I was reading: the first novel (from 1977) of a Booker Prize-winning novelist. At first it seemed to be an odd, old-fashioned whodunnit. As I read, I began to see a little more of what Fitzgerald was doing--telling a story that has elements of mystery and satire, and presented from the original, idiosyncratic point of view of a gifted writer. There's the parody of museum culture and the slightly surreal take on Cold War politics, perhaps the part of the story that seems most dated today, although still enjoyable and fascinating, as a look at recent history. What is most striking is Fitzgerald's economic prose style. The amount of story that she manages to tell in very few words is astonishing. I read this book during my recent conversion back from e-readers to print, and I was surprised every time I turned a page--it felt as if I had absorbed a whole chapter's worth of story in just two pages of comfortably medium-size print. This is why writers win prestigious awards. I don't believe this kind of style can be taught, although, never having taken any writing classes, I am obviously making a number of dubious assumptions here. As a writer, I found this book top-notch from the standpoint of style. I want to reread it slowly and carefully, to learn by example how to compress my natural wordiness into something more concentrated; not to copy or imitate, but to develop my own skills. And I want to read some of Fitzgerald's later works, to see her style at its best. As a reader, I did find the story a bit thin, but it is a first novel. Because I work in a museum that is a bit like the American counterpart of the setting, a slightly disguised British Museum, I very much enjoyed the look behind the scenes of museum culture and blockbuster exhibitions, especially remembering the King Tut exhibition that was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC around the time The Golden Child is set. Museum life and culture have changed a great deal since the late 1970s with the adoption of computers and other modern technology, but the politics of large not-for-profit institutions changes very, very slowly, and a lot of what Fitzgerald writes about here is still true in spirit, if not always literally. For readers new to Fitzgerald, I would suggest starting with later books that other readers have recommended. But if you already know her work and haven't read this, it's still an amusing, clever and slyly humorous work that won't disappoint reasonable expectations. (less) | Notes are private!
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Sep 22, 2012
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| 3.96
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| May 24, 2012
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Saying almost anything specific about this book is a "spoiler." One thing I can safely say (I think) is that it's about the ultimate dysfunctional mar...more
Saying almost anything specific about this book is a "spoiler." One thing I can safely say (I think) is that it's about the ultimate dysfunctional marriage; I suspect some of the readers who dislike it are put off by how loathsome the two main characters are. I'm tempted to follow the lead of a reviewer on Amazon who said something like "No more reviewing--just read it!" However, there are a few things I can add before I let you go ;) First, the story is dark and it's written for adults. By that I mean people who can handle toughness, or harshness: of ideas, of behavior, and, as another Amazon reviewer noted, "foul language." This last one fascinates me. That some potential readers were grateful, as shown by the several comments on a couple of reviews, to be warned about "foul language" in a modern, ultra-noir thriller strikes me as hilarious to the point of incredulity. Really? "Foul language?" What planet are you from, and does your mommy know you're trying to read above grade level? So, yes: read this book if you like a dark, twisty, noir thriller about clever, articulate, unlikable people. Gillian Flynn does a fabulous job of getting inside her characters' heads, male and female. In the Acknowledgments she thanks her husband for "[letting me ask] all sorts of invasive, inappropriate, and intrusive questions about being a guy." Her "research" definitely paid off. As a writer (and person) who is partial to "foul language" myself, I have to say the language in this book was excellent, meeting Jane Austen's standard for novel-writing by using "the best-chosen language." While Austen would probably not have liked some of the language in Gone Girl, I found it a perfect fit for the kind of story this is, and the proof is that I was never jolted out of the story to be aware of "inappropriate" language. I did notice, with approval, some coarse or harsh language. This is how many people talk and think to themselves, and it's very well done here. Why four stars only? It's perhaps almost too dark or too twisty. I felt mental fatigue setting in partway through reading it. It's essential that you're in the right mood for this story when you read it. If you'd rather be reading, say, Jane Austen (and nothing wrong with that), then read Jane Austen. Don't read Gone Girl just because everyone else is if it doesn't sound like your cup of tea. But don't miss it if you like Flynn's work or if you like tough, dark storytelling. Unlike some literary novels that employ "beautiful, poetic" image-heavy writing and go nowhere, the writing here is beautiful in its own dark, pointed way. Finally, I'll leave you with some quotes from the book, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about: "I waited patiently--years--for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit ... and make out with each other while we leer.... But it never happened." "Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that's how the hating first began." And my favorite quote, not only from the book but as the best commentary I've read on what the Internet has done to the profession of writer: "This was back when the Internet was still some exotic pet kept in the corner of the publishing world--throw some kibble at it, watch it dance on its little leash, oh quite cute, it definitely won't kill us in the night." (less) | Notes are private!
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We don't really need another three-star review of Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Most of what I have to say about the book has been said wittily and wel...more
We don't really need another three-star review of Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Most of what I have to say about the book has been said wittily and well by other reviewers. But after mulling over my reaction to this critically acclaimed but, for many ordinary readers, disappointing book, I feel it epitomizes the problem of today's publishing world. The explosion of e-books and self-published books is giving voice to so many good and not-half-bad writers--and a few excellent ones--none of whom have the literary credentials of an MFA, a job in the dwindling mainstream publishing industry or a stint at a creative writing program or writers' workshop. As the beleaguered and dwindling world of "literary fiction" circles the wagons against the marauding hordes of newcomers, it sometimes looks as if those on the inside are so desperate to retain their privileged status that they are drawing the lines between good and not-as-good writing in some peculiar, gerrymandered shapes in order to reward their own. Swamplandia! is a difficult book for many readers; readers like me who want a story, not a poem, a language exercise or an experiment. While there are many elements of a story in Swamplandia! the pace is glacial and most of the main plot, the narrator's search for her sister, is overwritten. What this means is that action that would take an old-fashioned plain novelist a chapter or two to relate bloats into what feels like an eternity of images and metaphors and similes. And did I mention images? Oh, God, if I wanted fifty million different poetic ways to describe the Everglades swamp and its plants and birds and insects I would probably not read a novel. Yes, it's "beautiful" writing. And so what? The Iliad has beautiful poetic writing because--it's a *poem.* It was sung, out loud, by bards who had to memorize it, and many of the repetitive images are mnemonic devices to help the narrator keep his mental place in a huge work. But when I read something that is called a novel, I want a different kind of storytelling. I've noticed recently that a number of novels that have driven me crazy: Swamplandia!; Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending; and to a lesser extent, The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje, have won high praise among more "sophisticated" readers and reviewers who value the authors' attempts to, in effect, do something different. Don't just tell us an interesting story using, as Jane Austen expressed it two hundred years ago, "the best-chosen language." Anyone can do that. Instead, parcel out fragments that we have to read through twice in order to know if we "got" it (Barnes); or make us wade through pages and pages of images going nowhere and then hit us with the most tired, depressing, overused plot point in recent novels (Russell); or give us vignettes of a vaguely autobiographical episode in the author/narrator's life that work to distance us from the character (Ondaatje). At least you're not just telling a straightforward story in a straightforward way. Swamplandia! does have an interesting story to tell, especially the secondary story, told in a far more traditional style, featuring the narrator's brother. The satire of Florida theme-park culture is brilliant and hilarious, although I imagine readers who are familiar with what is being satirized will get more out of it. Still, even this provincial New Yorker appreciated the general concept, and wished that the rest of the book had employed the same narrative drive, humor and wit. And that's the problem: over the English novel's brief, three-hundred-year or so life, many writers have mastered the art of telling a good story well. It's possible, for all I know, that MFA programs and workshops teach that that's not enough, that to be a topnotch novelist you have to do something more. Even Jonathan Franzen, who writes excellent "old-fashioned" novels, is (so I've heard) looked down on within the literary establishment as a writer of "women's fiction." Horrors! Anyway, bottom line on Swamplandia!: There's a good story here, or two or three, an unusual family and setting, and a clever, most unreliable narrator, but much of it is buried under too much "beautiful writing." If you're the sort of reader that likes description you may like the book a lot more than I did. But if you're looking for a good story that you can't put down, you could do a lot worse than another book I read recently, one that didn't win any awards, that isn't blurbed by top writers or even "really" published: Pennance, an e-book by Clare Ashton. You'll thank me later. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...(less) | Notes are private!
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Pennance is a beautifully-crafted debut novel that does the two most important things for a new writer: it establishes a voice and a mood. In Pennance...more
Pennance is a beautifully-crafted debut novel that does the two most important things for a new writer: it establishes a voice and a mood. In Pennance, the voice is that of a woman who is scarred both physically and emotionally, the result of a car crash and fire that killed her boyfriend. The mood is a perfect evocation of the setting, a small town in Cornwall: ingrown, governed by minuscule distinctions of family and class, and suspicious of all outsiders and especially of Lucy, our narrator/protagonist. The novel is a form of romantic suspense, dominated by the suspense, consisting of Lucy's (and our) growing awareness that someone really is out to get her, and with the romance developing slowly, resolved only at the very end of the book. Most of the story, especially the first half, is concerned with Lucy's fragile emotional state. Wracked with guilt over her own survival and failure to save her partner, Jake, fearful of confrontations with Jake's family and the owner of the garage that serviced the fatal car, whom they're suing, Lucy is both timid and resolute, agoraphobic and stubborn. Ashton does an excellent job of making us feel Lucy's terror at subjecting herself to the stares and judgments, real or imagined, of her fellow villagers. Lucy forces herself to make the weekly trip to the market for groceries and spends the rest of her time avoiding people, going for runs in the woods and bicycling to her job rather than face the ordeal of driving. If the narrative of the conventional m/f romance novel often involves a wounded hero who must be healed, for this lesbian romance Lucy makes a lovely wounded co-heroine. We see her strength returning as she refuses to give in to her fears and to the protective but constricting advice of Ben, Jake's brother. Lucy is determined to remain independent, staying in the unheated cottage she shared with Jake, using a space heater in one room rather than lighting a fire that would re-create her trauma, continuing to build up her strength with her running and supporting herself with her computer-tech job. When Lucy meets her new neighbor, Karen, the attraction is shown so subtly that I (a most unsubtle reader and writer) did not immediately pick up on it. I only figured it out because I knew this was supposed to be a "lesbian romance"--and a very good one it is. In recent years, we've come a long way with same-sex love stories, and there are plenty of works of both literary and genre fiction that feature women who know what they like and go after it with gusto. So it's a kind of retro pleasure to read this somewhat old-fashioned love story between two women who have both been involved in longterm relationships with men and come to the realization, slowly and almost reluctantly (on Lucy's part), of who they are and of their true desires. I'm giving Pennance four stars as a signal that Ashton is a fine writer who is going to do even better with her next books. Pennance shows typical errors of a new, self-published author: the copy editing is on the level of second draft, not a finished product gone over with a fine-toothed comb; the narrative voice relies too often, as another reviewer has remarked, on the internal "I thought," "I wondered," "I realized" phrases that distance readers from the protagonist's emotions; and, unusually for a unedited writer, too few commas instead of too many! All this is easily corrected or improved in subsequent novels, and I look forward to reading them. (less) | Notes are private!
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If you plan to read this book and you haven't seen the 1993 movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder--keep it that way! Admitte...more
If you plan to read this book and you haven't seen the 1993 movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder--keep it that way! Admittedly a hard book to make into a movie, "Innocence" is best experienced with a mind unspoiled--or unsoiled--by images of a faulty adaptation. Simply on the superficial level of comparing the way things were with the way they are "now" (the pre-WWI of the novel's end, as well as the 1920 of its publication) this book is amazing. Wharton is clearly having fun with her readers, reveling in the post-war freedom of sex, of social class, of old and new money, and of intellectual life, and contrasting it with the narrow, limited society of forty or fifty years previously. Native New Yorkers especially will be delighted with such descriptions as the dark, empty little dump that is the new Metropolitan Museum of Art and cackle over one elderly society matron who dares to build her mansion so far uptown as to border on "the Central Park." Wharton develops her story with subtlety, giving us a picture of the world her protagonist, Newland Archer, inhabits as a stealthy introduction to his character and situation. Readers like me, who tend to need everthing spelled out, will want to read carefully, because halfway through what feels like setting the scene we, like Archer, wake up to find ourselves in over our heads. We see what a mess Archer has landed himself in, and how incapable he is of extricating himself. Biographical criticism is out of fashion these days, as are certain elements of Wharton's style of writing. We're told by authorities like Stephen King and Elmore Leonard never to use adverbs and never to have characters "sigh" or "grumble" their dialogue but only to "say" it. (... he said.) Wharton breaks these rules often in "Innocence," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Heh! And so I looked her up in Wikipedia to see that she endured a sexless marriage for years, blaming her mother and that constricted world of her youth for her enforced "innocence," eventually finding the courage to get a divorce and enjoying one satisfying sexual and romantic relationship (with, BTW, a bisexual man). In "The Age of Innocence," Wharton treats all her characters with fairness and even kindness. Archer's wife, May, whom he sees throughout the novel as unimaginative and conventional, is shown by the end to be wiser and more generous than he appreciates; Archer's own stultifying passivity is not entirely a character flaw, but is at least in part the inevitable result of growing up in this limited world. Archer is, in a certain way, condemned to his life by the fact that he is a decent, honorable man. He is capable of genuine love and wants something better than the routine "affairs" and empty marriages of his acquaintances. The unromantic ending, which both shocked and pleased me, feels exactly right. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 9780224094153
| 3.69
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| Aug 04, 2011
| Aug 04, 2011
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I hated this book, and maybe that's because I don't consider it a novel. To me, a novel should tell an interesting story in a satisfying way. What Bar...more
I hated this book, and maybe that's because I don't consider it a novel. To me, a novel should tell an interesting story in a satisfying way. What Barnes has done here is to write another form entirely. It's fiction, certainly, but not storytelling, not in the old-fashioned sense. I imagine for some excellent writers like Barnes writing traditional novels can become so unchallenging that they're compelled to do something different. Maybe as more and more writers feel frustrated by the constraints of popular fiction they can come up with a new category: Nubble? Nivel? Nuffle? Apparently there are plenty of more sophisticated readers than I am out there who are also tired of conventional narratives with a plausible plot and characters that are sympathetic—which is not the same thing as being "likable." (A character can be a shit because of being damaged, and if the author shows how that damage came about the character can be sympathetic but still unpleasant.) What I hated about this book was the combination of unsatisfying elements: no real story, no interesting characters and an attempt at writing a shallow, unaware "everyman" narrator who I didn't believe in for one minute because I felt that Barnes is too intelligent to imagine such a person and inhabit his being so far as to make him credible. It's like me trying to imagine myself into the head of a Republican: no matter how I try it will sound like a feminist, queer atheist trying to animate what remains a caricature. So why did I give this book two stars and not the minimum one? Because Barnes is a good writer. His style is spare and impeccable. Two stars is the average of the four stars I would give for style and the zero for story and characters and interest and engagement with the reader. I can't tell from all the reader reviews I've read how many of the reviewers are also writers, as I am (although of course nowhere near Barnes's level). In general I would expect other writers to appreciate these qualities in the book that I perceive, from the perspective of a reader, as deficiencies, and this would explain all those 5- and 4-star reviews. Yes, we all get tired of writing the same old same old; we all want to challenge ourselves, if not our readers; we want to write something different, a story that goes nowhere or characters that don't amount to much--but none of this worked for me as reader or writer. I felt frustrated and annoyed by this book, and grateful it was short. I'm sure part of it is the difference between British and American culture. Nothing can cure a person of being an anglophile like the English. They're so much more articulate than we are and yet all their ideas are a decade or two behind ours on issues like sexuality and gender. And then there's the whole social class thing. Usually I adore that aspect of a British-inflected story, something we can't quite parse over here and that always requires a close reading between the lines, but in this case my feeling is it's a red herring. Without "spoiling" the story (sheesh! You have to have a plot or a story if you're going to "spoil" it, but for what it's worth I'll try to speak obliquely) if something similar were to happen in an American middle-class family (assuming it actually "happened" in this story), it would be hashed out to death, everybody would see a shrink and—it wouldn't happen in the first place, or not like this, because we are messed up in very different ways over here about different things. The "philosophy" that the narrator and his schoolmates spout in the first section is just so much overheated leftovers of half-baked adolescent rubbish, as I'm sure Barnes means us to think, but of course lots of reader/reviewers take it seriously. The snippet from the diary of one of the characters is excruciating. If I thought like that, and expressed my thoughts that way, I'd kill myself too—or should. And then when events "prove" or "disprove" the value of this specious "philosophy" in making (non)sense of a (non)ending Barnes can either be laughing at us for being as clueless as the narrator and his ilk, or we can be laughing with Barnes as he's shown—what? That middling minds can't handle the truth? That we remember what we can handle and no more? No shit. Come on, tell us something we don't know. If you want to write this kind of thing, go ahead. Just don't call it a novel. Storytelling is an ancient art; novels are a young form. I don't believe we have to deform the novel with the literary equivalent of foot-binding or the whale-bone corset and an 18-inch waist to make it attractive. And please start awarding literary prizes for fiction to real novels. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 4.09
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Why "masculinity" still rules...and "femininity" is still dangerous. I can't add much to the (deserved) glowing reviews for this collection of essays t...more Why "masculinity" still rules...and "femininity" is still dangerous. I can't add much to the (deserved) glowing reviews for this collection of essays that is now 18 years old and as radical, relevant and challenging to unreflective fashionable opinions as when it first appeared. Simpson understands men and writes honestly about them in ways that so many writers can't or won't. As other reviewers have mentioned--and it bears repeating: Simpson's most important message may be that gay men are men and same-sex orientation is just one way of being a man, of being "masculine," out of many equally "masculine" ways of being. Simpson's embrace of Freudian theory holds up well and is an excellent support for his arguments. Rather than seeming outdated, the references and ideas come across as refreshing and thought-provoking. For this reader, whose only familiarity with Freud is pop culture's oversimplification bordering on ridicule, Simpson's clear explication of Freud's ideas, and his convincing way of using them to analyze male attitudes and behavior, is an enticing introduction that made me want to read the original. My favorite chapter was the last, "Popular men: manly and unmanly," which includes an analysis of the brilliant comedy team Laurel and Hardy and their films from the 1920s and 30s. Simpson shows that the homoerotic elements in the comedy are both genuinely "sexual," as some gay activists have claimed, and at the same time "innocent." The sweetness in the humor is perhaps the last remnant of a time when same-sex love could hide in plain sight under the guise of comedy, and when love between men did not necessarily imply "buggery-pokery," as Simpson so delightfully calls it. Anybody who likes men, is interested in them, or just wants to read a well-written, humorous yet serious book about a major cultural obsession should not miss this book. It's now out in a Kindle edition as well as the paperback, but since the Kindle edition lacks linked footnotes and table of contents, it's a frustrating read for any except the most casual readers. (less) | Notes are private!
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I may not be the ideal reviewer for this hard-to-categorize collection of short stories and essays. I "met" Quiet Riot Girl online through our shared...more
I may not be the ideal reviewer for this hard-to-categorize collection of short stories and essays. I "met" Quiet Riot Girl online through our shared appreciation of gay British blogger Mark Simpson. As a result, I have learned that QRG does not "believe in" feminism or the gender binary. And while it's probably better not to know too much about a writer as an individual in order to experience his/her work on its own, this information was helpful to me in persevering with a book I would otherwise have abandoned after the first story. The title of the collection and first story is a reference to the recently published "The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures" by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy. In that first story, QRG portrays what seems to this 21st-century middle-aged New York City feminist an outdated stereotype of a stagnant marriage between middle-class Brits in their early 40s. The wife is excited by the idea of polyamory and joins a group to explore the possibilities of "swinging" and "secondary partners." The husband understandably resists the idea of such a rule-bound form of sexual experimentation and goes to the neighborhood pub instead, where at the end of the evening he is invited into the flat of the 20-something barmaid Jo (whose androgynous look he contrasts with his "fleshy" wife) and given "the best blowjob of his life." Yeah, that resonates with most of us fleshy women over 30... Don't be put off by that first story. Start with the third story, "Taken," about a chance sexual encounter, the one piece of erotica that really worked for me. Or perhaps with the essay on "Macho Fags," or "Bullet," an excerpt from a novel about "Foucault's Daughter." There's nothing terribly modern or new here: surely we know that gay men aren't all "effeminate" and that the clone look of the late 1970s was a way to play with and perform ideas of masculinity. But it doesn't hurt to revisit some of these concepts thirty or forty years later, especially for the many readers who are too young to have lived through those exciting times, or for anybody who still thinks that being a gay man necessarily means being sympathetic to women and "feminism." The funniest piece is the last, "Fucking Steinbeck." This is a hilarious comment from across the Pond on "Great American Literature." The narrator, standing at the end of a London subway car, sees a beautiful red-haired woman who "reminds me of Orlando, as played by Tilda Swinton," and a man reading something by Steinbeck who never looks at her. "Why can't that man ... be reading someone more subtle, someone who gives the rest of us a bit of space to breathe?" I've given this book four stars because it actually does what most works of nonfiction or unusual fiction promise but rarely achieve: it made me uncomfortable in a thought-provoking way. It looks at situations and ways of being that I feel have been solved and shut away in the attic of my mind and forced me to reexamine and reevaluate them. The writing, like all good prose, is spare and simple. There's no fussy overwriting or elaboration, or metaphors piled upon metaphors, no tangles of convoluted prose. QRG uses neat, clean writing to tell messy stories and ask inconvenient questions. The title and first story introduce the theme by asking a very modern question: can "sex" of any kind maintain its excitement when it's reined in by rules, by safe words and codes of conduct? Some of us remember when BDSM was just S&M, a carefully-guarded secret, a genuine radical sexual underground. Now it's all gone mainstream. Mark Simpson wrote a blog post a few years ago lamenting the way that the decriminalization of "gay sex" has led to the loss or dulling of the old forms of gay night life and risky, transgressive encounters. Nobody wants to go back to the days of arrests for soliciting in public toilets or, in this country, the not-so-long ago time when in some states the authorities could raid a private home and arrest two consenting male adults for committing "sodomy" in their own bedroom. It's just that being "ethical" tends to take all the fun out of being a slut. "It makes sex sound rather academic and political," the husband in that first story thinks. "All this analysis is highly unsexy." In "Unethical Sluts," QRG gives us some ideas for making sex sexy again. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 3.77
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Reading fiction is my addiction (oh, hell, I didn't mean to start with a stupid rhyme, but I'm keeping it because it's true). What this means is that...more
Reading fiction is my addiction (oh, hell, I didn't mean to start with a stupid rhyme, but I'm keeping it because it's true). What this means is that I can't read as much fiction as I'd like because then I'd never do anything else. And therefore, sometimes, because I have to keep myself on such short rations, I break loose and throw a day away. Which is what I did yesterday with Case Histories. This is a book that once you start reading it you can't stop. I figured this out early on and just accepted it. I was eating a late breakfast when I started, so I kept on going. I did not brush my teeth, put in my contact lenses, take a shower or get dressed. I didn't eat any more meals, but brought items of health food (green olives, potato chips, Raisinets and iced tea) into the living room. (Yes, that's supposed to be funny.) I know, I'm reviewing myself, not the book. Many other reviews have said what there is to say. So here's my two cents: Reader opinions boil down to: 1. People who love this book because it's not a conventional detective story/procedural/mystery; and 2. People who think it would be a (much) better book if Atkinson adopted the time-tested practices of good genre writing. How you'll react to the book depends on where your tastes line up on the genre/literary line. Now, a lot of why I chose this book had to do with the fact that I'd heard so many good things about Atkinson's series of "atypical" detective novels. This is the first one, and I'm anal enough that I always like to start with the first of any series and read them in order. So I was in the mood for a "genre" book that has elements of "literary" fiction: plots that aren't always perfectly hidden or revealed, character sketches instead of jumping right into the action, and so on. If you're not in the mood for this kind of thing, you're not going to like this book as much as I did. On the other hand, I do agree with some of the objections in the unfavorable, or less favorable reviews: some of the characters were stereotypes and the solutions to their situations tired and cliched. I enjoyed the portrayal of typically British dysfunctional families, thought it was harsh and bracing at first, only to find it repetitive about two thirds of the way through. But I loved the way Atkinson wrote those character sketches instead-of-getting-right-to-the-plot. I loved the mix of humor and bad things happening to good people, a great mood for any kind of story and especially a detective story. More and more we're coming to understand that this genre vs. literary divide is bogus, that there is good writing and not so good writing, and that not every reader likes exactly the same thing. Atkinson is a good writer, and when I'm ready to throw another day away I'll probably pick the next title in the series. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 4.00
| 21,847
| Mar 29, 2005
| Jan 31, 2006
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This is a terrific book for people who "don't like history." For me, not liking history is similar to not liking stories, or food, or people or sex. W...more
This is a terrific book for people who "don't like history." For me, not liking history is similar to not liking stories, or food, or people or sex. What people who "don't like" history really mean is that they've never had good history. It's like only knowing Hitler and Stalin, only having been fed sawdust and rotting meat, and only been given the protagonist's deranged typing in The Shining ("red rum red rum red rum...") to read. So when people who "don't like" history are going to be introduced to good history, it helps to make it personal and funny, which is what Sarah Vowell does here with the first three U.S. presidential assassinations. (Did anyone else notice that you spell "assassination" by typing "ass" twice? Feels so wrong.) Anyway, Vowell is very good at this sort of thing, and it's not her fault that the Lincoln section of the book overshadows the rest. He's such a heroic figure compared to the two others, and the events of the assassination itself and Booth's capture are fascinating and relatively familiar to most readers. Vowell manages to unearth a great many connections and details, and goes off on a lot of tangents that will be welcomed by readers who think they know all about this low point in American history. After a while the constant jokey, casual, "zany" mood that Vowell sustains can become a little tedious, but the fact that she manages to do it at all is amazing. I doubt anybody could make the politics of the McKinley (the third assassination) era interesting; and I wanted more details on the gruesome "medical" treatment that poor Garfield (no. 2) endured. But I think a lot of that only came out recently, so I can't exactly blame a book written a few years ago for not including it. Some reviewers object to Vowell's derisive references to the current president (when she wrote it) or to her injecting personal opinions at all. But I loved the way she drew parallels between the crass politics of the post-Civil War and Gilded Age and the appalling goings-on of the George W. Bush era. If you really think that's offensive, perhaps you should study up on current events. But I did find some of Vowell's bend-over-backward, knee-jerk apologies for an ancestor who was on the "wrong" side of things somehow cringe-inducing. Not one of us has a blemish-free family tree, for the simple reason that, unless we're angels in disguise, we're all descended from human beings. Some of everybody's ancestors were on the "wrong" side in a war, did bad things or were bad people. Until there are time machines, we can't go back and fix it--and we'd probably prevent our own existence if we did, which might not be such a bad idea, but still.... Anway, this is a four-star book and a welcome addition to the "history can be fun" genre. I also recommend Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic as a quirky look at the "War Between the States" and the people who want to live it. (less) | Notes are private!
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| 3.99
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| 3.85
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| 4.05
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| 3.94
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| 4.15
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| 4.11
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| 4.06
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Birth, the fourth in the Eclipsis series of Lady Amalie's memoirs, represents the harsher, more humorous, "dark side" of my writing. This is the best s...more Birth, the fourth in the Eclipsis series of Lady Amalie's memoirs, represents the harsher, more humorous, "dark side" of my writing. This is the best so far of the "memoirs" (in my very biased opinion), but readers who like the kinder, gentler style will prefer Wedding. I think they're both good, each representing a different side of my mature writing style. Birth is that year-later coda I always want to tack on to my romance novels. Amalie, now 'Gravina Aranyi, married to Dominic, is about to pop with her first child. The perfect honeymoon has devolved into nonstop misunderstandings and rancorous fights between husband and wife, no longer resolved with terrific make-up sex. It's gotten so bad that Stefan Ormonde, Dominic's sixteen-year-old companion, has moved out. And so, in a spirit of reconciliation, Amalie arranges a gift for Dominic, a tryst with a handsome young nobleman. The story moves between the present tense and flashbacks, as Amalie shares telepathically in Dominic's lovemaking, and reflects on the recent past of her combative marriage. There's more humor in this segment than the first three, and the lyrical, poetic mood of Wedding has given way to a grittier, spare style. I like to think the two parts complement each other, Wedding showing the great love that underlies this marriage of true minds, Birth portraying the inevitable difficulties in any marriage of strong-willed, bad-tempered people from different worlds. Birth allows readers a glimpse of the reality beneath the romantic facade, but leaves us with the hope that even the most divisive of conflicts can be resolved with love. This is the one book of the memoirs I've flagged as containing "adult" material--although it's no more explicit than Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, and quite a lot less so than Pride/Prejudice. That's the difference between genre self-publishing and non-genre, mainstream, published fiction. In the latter, anything goes. If you're hesitating over wasting your time and money on self-published e-books, I recommend starting with Birth. It's only a buck, and it's short, funny, sexy and odd. You won't find anything else like it out there. (less) | Notes are private!
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Wedding is the book in which Amelia Herzog becomes Amalie, 'Gravina Aranyi ("Lady Amalie")--and a writer. In this third installment of the Eclipsis mem...more Wedding is the book in which Amelia Herzog becomes Amalie, 'Gravina Aranyi ("Lady Amalie")--and a writer. In this third installment of the Eclipsis memoirs, Amalie and Dominic, Margrave Aranyi, finally have the chance to be together--and boy! is that a disaster! But soon enough we discover it's not really his fault. There's a rebellion in the north, a telepathic weapon in play, and Dominic must leave Amalie at his home while he takes out his aggression on the rebels. And it's here, in describing Aranyi Fortress and its extensive grounds, that Amalie's writing takes on its "poetic, cosmic" voice (as reviewer T.T. Thomas calls it). Honestly, I wouldn't go that far. But this is the soft, romantic, "mellifluous" voice that is one side of my dual personality as a writer, one that I have been suppressing in my later writing in order to explore the harsher, comic, darker side. It's a pleasure to have this novel-length expression of the "light" side to balance things out. As Amalie explores the Aranyi household and way of life, there's a similarity to the Pemberley moment in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. But where Elizabeth Bennet learned the truth of Mr. Darcy's good character by seeing his well-run estate and the affection for him among the people who worked there, Amalie's epiphany is on a larger scale. She already knows she loves Dominic, whether he's good or bad--he's her mate, the "one" for her (and she's no angel either). What she learns about is a way of life, an entire world, one that is attempting to live in an ecologically sustainable way and without the modern world's commercialism and economic divisions. It's "socialism without equality." "The Aranyi household enjoyed its high standard of living, but it would not squander the wealth through unrestrained consumption while impoverishing the people who worked to create it." Wedding is primarily a love story, about a woman from the modern world adapting to a very different life. But there are larger issues in the background, ones that are much in the news today: human-caused climate change and its effect on the environment; women's rights within marriage; and the costs of a society in which wealth is concentrated in an upper .1% while the rest of the population lives in poverty. But it's not oppressively serious in tone, and readers hoping to read about a polyamorous marriage with a bisexual husband in the middle will not be disappointed. (less) | Notes are private!
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Choices is the second segment of the Eclipsis memoirs written by Lady Amalie Aranyi, continuing the adventures of the main charatcer, Amelia Herzog, i...more
Choices is the second segment of the Eclipsis memoirs written by Lady Amalie Aranyi, continuing the adventures of the main charatcer, Amelia Herzog, introduced in Recognition. This is a short novel, concerned with Amelia's education in the use and control of her telepathic gift. If the theme of the memoirs as a whole is finding one's place in the world, the theme of Choices is one that many women no longer have to face: career vs. marriage. But for Amelia and other women who are members of the telepathic elite of this sword-and sorcery world, the choice is very real. Readers of my generation will recall when such a choice was not relegated to fantasy fiction, and that feminist sci-fi and fantasy were ways for us to explore the issue with more options than the real world provided. Because I'm writing it, there is some humor and weirdness as well as "women's issues" in Choices. For example, readers may enjoy learning about telepathic lovemaking at a distance, and cringe along with Amelia/Amalie when she learns about the consequences. And Amalie's encounters with Dominic, Margrave Aranyi, the man she will eventually marry (not really a spoiler, is it?) are always good for a laugh. We can see already that this mixed marriage of Terran misfit and Eclipsian aristocrat will be "combative," as protrayed in the next two segments. (less) | Notes are private!
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I don't know why they let an author review her own books. But here goes: Recognition is a short novella (short even for a novella). It's the first segm...more I don't know why they let an author review her own books. But here goes: Recognition is a short novella (short even for a novella). It's the first segment of a doorstopper that I had planned to call something like "Coming Home" (I know, not exactly original). In an ideal world, I'd be able to get the whole thing ready for publication all at once. This first story introduces Amelia Herzog, the narrator/protagonist who will eventually become "Lady Amalie," the author of these memoirs, set on the sword-and-sorcery world of Eclipsis. Amelia is "different." She hears people's thoughts and she has protective third eyelids (inner eyelids), as some reptiles do, that descend when she's exposed to bright sunlight. The Eclipsis memoirs are about finding one's place in the world, even if it means having to travel halfway across the universe, and figuring out what makes us happy. Sometimes what's normal for everyone else is wrong for us, and what's odd or unpleasant or creepy for others, like a bisexual swordsman husband with a sixteen-year-old "companion," is exactly right. Read in order, Recognition, Choices and Wedding form the standard shape of a romance. Like my published work, the theme is the woman happily married to a bisexual husband and living in an m/m/f menage. There's little or no explicit sex in the stories, which some readers may appreciate, and the humor is understated and less stylized than in my Regency stories. But there is humor, and, in later stories, some sex. I hope readers who enjoyed my published novels will enjoy these works by the same author, writing at a different time in her career, from a different perspective and in a slightly different voice. (less) | Notes are private!
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| Aug 25, 2011
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This is the first of T.T. Thomas's short stories I read, and I was blown away. Who knew there was this writer out there creating beautiful, understate...more
This is the first of T.T. Thomas's short stories I read, and I was blown away. Who knew there was this writer out there creating beautiful, understated short pieces that pack an emotional wallop? The mood of "Hatbox" is conversational and (perhaps deceptively) straightforward, unlike the humorous, chilling Ronald Debby, the only other Thomas story I've read so far (although I intend to remedy that ASAP). "Hatbox" speaks to the way we see the other people around us as we're growing up, the friends and neighbors who exist on the periphery of our lives. Whether we're aware of doing so or not, we fictionalize these people because we can't know their truths until it's too late. This is a serious story, but not solemn, a short, compelling read that makes the reader think, sadly, of all the people we never really knew. And it includes a wonderfully detailed vignette of the narrator discovering her own truths, about her parents and how she came into existence. As a novelist, I find the short form excruciatingly hard to master. T.T. Thomas, apparently, has it down pat. Good thing she's no longer keeping it under her hat (sorry!) And wow! What a gorgerous cover!(less) | Notes are private!
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