Review 2082: Mrs. Lorimer’s Quiet Summer

Liz of Adventures in Reading announced Dean Street Press in December long after I read this book, and the press is trying to get some new books to me in time, but since this one came up in my regular review schedule, I’ll take credit for it!

Because she has been trying to talk her husband Jack into buying it, Mrs. Lorimer is disappointed to learn that a nearby home, Harperslea, has been sold. Now that all their children except Guy are married, and some of them have children, their home, Woodside, is not big enough when they all come to visit, which they are doing this summer. With all the income from her writing, they can afford to move, but Jack refuses to consider it. So, her good friend Gray Douglas, also a writer, will help her out by putting some of the guests up.

Mrs. Lorimer, who tends to be a worrier, is also worried about her son Guy. He has been mentioning a girl quite often in his letters, but Mrs. Lorimer is worried that she won’t be good enough for Guy.

At any rate, when the family shows up, Phillie seems to be the one with the problem. She begins behaving temperamentally, being rude to her husband, dashing off to Harperslea because she’s seen Miss Smellie, one of the new occupants, playing tennis and she wants a game. Then bringing Miss Smellie home to dinner and just abandoning her to her mother and Guy.

Miss Smellie is young and not very prepossessing, and they find out she hates her name, which is Nesta Rowena. So, the family dubs her Rona.

These and other family concerns enliven this charming novel. The novel cover claims the book is autobiographical, and it certainly has some likable and entertaining characters. So far, I have very much enjoyed the novels I’ve read by Clavering.

Related Posts

Dear Hugo

Susan Settles Down

Touch Not the Nettle

Review 2072: To Paradise

After reading Yanagihara’s deeply touching second book, A Little Life, I couldn’t wait to plunge into To Paradise. While reading the first section, though, I was afraid I was going to be disappointed, especially as it is of the genre speculative fiction, which is not one I’m usually interested in. But Yanagihara knows how to spin a tale.

The novel is split into three books, each set 100 years apart, starting in 1893. Although I’ve seen the novel described as a history of a family, let’s just say that names and personas repeat through the book, only with characters taking different roles. All of the books are set in New York City. They also feature strangely inert main characters.

This New York, though, is different from the one we know. After a civil war, the United States is fractured into pieces, one of which, called the Free States (in which New York resides), believes in freedom of religion and marriage between any two adults. David Bingham belongs to a family whose members are all in same-sex marriages. He is from a wealthy old family, and he is the eldest, but he has been a disappointment to his grandfather. He is subject to bouts of debilitating depression and seizures, and he has shown no interest in pursing any kind of career.

Another characteristic of the Free States is the prevalence of arranged marriages. David’s grandfather has been trying to arrange one for him, and the current candidate is an older man named Charles Griffith, whom David has at least agreed to meet. He likes Charles, but then he meets Edward Bishop, a poor musician. David falls for Edward, a man he knows his grandfather would consider a fortune hunter.

In 1993, David Bingham is a young Hawaiian who has left his home and his heritage as a native prince and with an incomplete law degree is working in a law firm. He is living with the wealthy older head of the firm, Charles Griffith, and although he loves Charles, because of this relationship, he spends most of his time with older men. AIDS is making its way through the community.

Also part of this book is a long narrative by David’s father, who is obsessed by his friendship with Edward Bishop, a Hawaiian nationalist with a dream of a return to a Hawaiian monarchy. Although this action causes a bit of a lull in the novel’s forward motion, we come to understand David’s alienation from his family.

In 2093, Charlie Griffith is a young woman living in a dangerous and autocratic society, the controls of which are designed to limit the spread of a deadly series of infectious diseases. Charlie herself is limited mentally and emotionally because she was a victim of one of these viruses when she was a child.

Her grandfather has arranged a marriage for her, but has traded a possibility of a loving marriage for a secure one with a gay male. Her husband has vowed to care for her in exchange for the appearance of a heterosexual marriage because homosexuality is becoming illegal. Then Charlie makes a friend named David.

This novel has many overarching themes, that of family, particularly relationships with grandparents, as none of the protagonists have functioning parents; sexuality in society; sickness and disease; and self-actualization. I was at first taken aback by the extreme passivity of its protagonists and in fact thought the first David Bingham was selfish and immature. Still, Yanigihara’s narrative pulls you in, and I found this novel completely absorbing. Some readers will be disappointed by Yanagihara’s decision to leave endings open, but I think that’s one of the things that makes this ambitious novel more interesting.

Related Posts

A Little Life

The People in the Trees

American War

Review 1650: The River

Harriet and her family live along the river in a town in India. Harriet is dismayed at the changes in her sister Bea, who is becoming a young lady and is no longer fun to play with. Her brother Bogey spends his time looking at insects and animals in the garden. Victoria is just a baby. Harriet spends some time each day writing in her book that she keeps hidden away, and she also is fascinated by her parents’ guest, Captain John, who was injured in WWI. Captain John, however, likes Bea best.

This little novel has a plot, but it is mostly atmospheric and descriptive, of the garden and house, of life on the river. I was just a short way in when I realized that I had seen the movie based on it by Jean Renoir. I said, “If there’s a snake, I’ve seen this.” There was a snake.

The semi-autobiographical novel is about Harriet waking up from childhood and complete self-involvement and learning to become a writer. It is beautiful and touching.

My Virago Modern Classics version also included two short stories, “Red Doe,” about Ibrahim, a bakriwar nomad who is on the way to another encampment to claim a wife, and “The Little Black Ram,” about Jassouf, a bad boy who is tamed by being give a black ram to care for.

Related Posts

Coromandel Sea Change

A God in Every Stone

Sea of Poppies

Review 1564: Dangerous Ages

Thanks to Simon Thomas’s posts (Stuck in a Book) on the new British Library Women Writers series, I was able to request some review copies. I received Dangerous Ages, which, according to the novel, are all of them. This novel examines the lives of women in the early 1920’s.

Neville is 43, a woman who gave up her medical studies as a young woman to marry and raise a family. That job done, she finds herself feeling adrift, with no purpose, and views her mother, Mrs. Hilary, as an object lesson. She must find work and decides to return to studying medicine.

Mrs. Hilary is a silly woman who always pretends she has read important books and is knowledgeable on all subjects. At 63, she has nothing to do, because she defines herself as a wife and mother. Now she is a widow whose children are grown. She is jealous of anyone being intimate with Neville if her son Jim isn’t around and is jealous of Neville’s intimacy with Jim. She thinks psychoanalysis, which is being talked about, is horrid until she realizes it means someone will listen to her stories.

Nan, Neville’s younger sister, has been courted by Barry for ages. She finally decides she loves him, but instead of telling him so, she goes off to Cornwall to finish writing her latest book, never thinking that Barry might give up on her.

Gerda, Neville’s daughter, is ardently engaged in left-wing activities. The question is, when she falls in love with a man of a different background, whether she will compromise her principles, which reject all the values of her parents’ generation.

Macaulay’s novel is rooted in the early 1920’s, as characters examine hot topics of the time. I had to laugh at the scenes where Mrs. Hilary’s psychoanalysts inundate her with Freudian jargon that she has very little understanding of. That most of these women are frustrated in their aims should not be surprising, for this is a satirical look at the position of women in society. Only Neville’s sister Pamela, who refuses to be bothered, and Neville’s grandmother, who says she is past all that, seem happy.

Simon Thomas’s Afterword provides some insight into views of psychoanalysis in the early 1920’s, which is interesting.

I enjoyed this novel very much. It feels like light, lively reading while dealing with experiences that are universal, no matter the generation.

Related Posts

The Towers of Trebizond

Consequences

South Riding

Review 1536: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Best of Ten!
I’m late to discover Maggie O’Farrell, but better late than never. I’ve read a few books by her now, and she just keeps getting better and better.

Iris Lockhart is contacted by a mental hospital, which wants to find out if she can offer a home to her great aunt, Esme, who has been incarcerated there for more than 60 years. The problem is that Iris has never heard of Esme and believes her grandmother to be an only child.

Her mother now lives in Australia and has never heard of Esme, either. When Iris tries to discuss Esme with her grandmother, Katherine, who is suffering from Alzheimers, she gets a fractured response that implies Esme is her sister. In particular, she says, “She wouldn’t let go of the baby.”

Through third-person narration from Iris’s point of view, Esme’s stream of consciousness memories, and Katherine’s more fractured ones, we learn how it came to pass that vibrant and unconventional Esme was abandoned in the hospital from the age of 16. Iris is shocked to learn that Esme was incarcerated for such outrages as insisting on keeping her hair long and dancing in her dead mother’s clothes. She learns that at the time women could be committed on the signature of one doctor.

This is a shattering, sad story about a girl whose life is stolen because she doesn’t fit in. It is spellbinding as it draws you along to learn Esme’s story. This is also fascinating tale about how sisterly love turns to jealousy and anger.

Related Posts

After You’d Gone

Instructions for a Heatwave

This Must Be the Place

Review 1501: Pachinko

In 1932, 16-year-old Sunja is fascinated by Hansee, a debonair Korean who lives in Japan but visits her small village in Korea to buy fish. Sunja has an affair with him, but when she learns she is pregnant, he tells her he has a wife and children in Japan but wants her to be his Korean wife. While realizing she will disgrace her family, she does not agree.

Isak, a frail Christian minister, comes to stay at Sunja’s mother’s boarding house on his way to Japan, but he soon falls ill with tuberculosis. Sunja and her mother Yangjin nurse him back to health. When he understands Sunja’s predicament, he offers to marry her to give her child a father. So, the couple leave for Japan, where the novel follows the fates of them and their descendents for the next fifty plus years.

At the time of the beginning of the novel, Japan ruled Korea, and the Japanese treated the Koreans as second-class citizens in their own country. In Japan, the Koreans are considered dirty and lazy and are forced to live in ghettos. They are discriminated against, and most are not allowed to become citizens even if born there.

This novel is an interesting story about the difficulties Koreans had living in Japan. It is the type of novel that is more interested in what happens to this family, though, than in creating well-rounded characters. I liked it but did not love it.

Related Posts

A Tale for the Time Being

The Vegetarian

Unbroken

Day 1187: Edgar & Lucy

Before I start my review, I realized I forgot to check the spin number on Friday morning. It seems as if Classics Club always picks the number for the most obscure book on my list. This time, I get to read Le Morte D’Arthur.

* * *

Best of Five!
Eight-year-old Edgar has no idea about the terrible events that took place when he was a baby. He lives with his mother, Lucy, and his grandmother Florence, who tells him innocuous lies about Frank, his father and her son.

Lucy and Florence have not been getting along lately. Lucy, still traumatized by her husband’s death, has been drinking too much and seeing men, when old-fashioned Florence would like her to be a perpetual widow. But Florence dies, and a series of misunderstandings and accidents at the time of her death place Edgar in danger.

Although I wouldn’t describe Edgar & Lucy as a thriller, it kept me pinned to the page much like a good thriller would, and the novel has some thriller-like plot characteristics. But really, it is a thorough examination of several characters under trying circumstances. And one of them is a ghost.

This novel is highly unusual. At times, it is almost meditative while at other times it reveals its characters’ minds as almost hallucinogenically original. If you decide to read it, I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Related Posts

Room

The Burgess Boys

The Good Lord Bird

 

Day 600: My Father’s Eyes

When she was in high school, author Sheila Allee discovered that her father had a brother she didn’t know existed. Melrose Allee, nicknamed Pie, was born with profound intellectual disabilities. Once Allee’s father “Dub,” who had taken much of the burden for Melrose’s care, left home in 1937, his parents placed Melrose in Austin State School. Even though her father was angry with his parents and swore to get his brother out, he never did, and Melrose eventually became an unmentioned subject.

Sheila could not understand how her family could have institutionalized her uncle in the first place and even worse, how they could have left him for years, unvisited. When she moved to Austin as an adult, she set about finding Melrose, eventually locating him in Travis State School in 1991.

This short book is the touching story of Allee’s own self-discovery through the agency of her impaired uncle. It is also the story of her discovery of the profoundly disturbing beliefs and practices surrounding the mentally handicapped that were practiced in this country in the first half of the 20th century.

In the interests of full disclosure, I know Ms. Allee, and I received a copy of her book in return for an honest review.

Day 594: The House We Grew Up In

In some ways The House We Grew Up In hit home for me, but ultimately I felt it both was a bit unlikely and found too easy a solution for large problems. It is about a family trying to cope with a terrible event and with their mother’s mental illness.

We meet the Bird family at various stages of their lives, beginning when the oldest daughter Meg is about ten. As Easter is mother Lorelei’s favorite holiday, many of the events in the novel are set at that time.

In her mid-thirties, Lorelei Bird is a vibrant, beautiful woman, but there are already signs of what will become her obsession. Her kitchen is cheerfully cluttered and serves as the gathering spot for friends and neighbors. Lorelei’s husband Colin is a gentle, loving man, but when the wading pool gets punctured and Lorelei argues for keeping it anyway, he remarks mildly that they already have several punctured pools in storage. The kitchen wall is gay with children’s drawings, but when any of the children draw something new, Colin hastily claims it to put in his files.

When Lorelei’s youngest children are sixteen, tragedy strikes. From a seemingly happy family, the Birds disintegrate into unhappy adults. Meg, apparently the most well-adjusted and practical, is rigid and judgmental and  fanatical about neatness. Bethany, slightly younger, is afraid to leave home and carries on an inappropriate affair for years. Rory simply leaves, seldom to be seen again.

Lorelei dumps Colin for a relationship with Vicky, the next-door neighbor. By the time of her death, twenty years later, she has accumulated so much junk in the house that only narrow pathways are open and she lives in one soft chair. All her loved ones have left her because they can’t live in the environment she has created.

With her death, the scattered family reassembles to try to clean out the house. As they exchange information, they slowly begin to understand some family secrets.

In some ways, the novel affected me because I have a family member who is a hoarder, although not yet on the scale of Lorelei. Still, we have an unusable room and some junk piled up even in the public rooms. It is very difficult to deal with.

Yet, I felt that the novel was too easy. First, it gives every member of the immediate family severe emotional problems, which I actually found unlikely. Then it clears them up magically at the end after a few conversations. Not happening. The ending moves the novel in my mind from a thoughtful examination of the problems caused by unresolved tragedies and mental illness to something more closely resembling a sitcom ending.

 

Day 586: Wit’s End

Rima Lansill finds herself suddenly without a family. Both her parents are dead: her mother when she was young and her father just recently of cancer. It is not so much her father’s death that has rocked her, though, but that of her younger brother Oliver in a drunk-driving accident. Rima is upset enough to want to get away from Cleveland for awhile, so she is happy to accept the invitation of her godmother to stay at her house of Wit’s End in Santa Cruz, California.

Rima’s godmother is the famous mystery writer A. B. Early—Addison—whose sleuth is Maxwell Lane. Rima has read all of Addison’s books but has never actually met her, as there was some sort of rift between Addison and Bim, Rima’s father. Rima wonders if it was caused by Addison having used Bim’s name for the murderer in one of her books.

Taking sleuthing tips from Maxwell Lane himself, Rima decides to try to find out what happened and just what her father’s relationship to Addison was. Addison herself is not very forthcoming, but some letters Rima finds in Maxwell’s fan mail show knowledge of the real Bim, not the fictional murderer. And these letters arrived from the home of what used to be a cult.

I have now read three Fowler novels, and they all construct an interesting tale full of well-meaning characters (although We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves leaves the others in its dust). There are some alarming moments in Wit’s End, but mostly what it offers is comfort and a new home for the main character. I have categorized it as a mystery, but the mystery is really only something to hang the characters and atmosphere on, as the book club is in The Jane Austen Book Club. Wit’s End is a fun bit of very light reading.