I’m trying to get back in the habit of writing up most (maybe not all) of the books I read so here we go with a quickish update on two novels that I recently finished.
I heard a lot about Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses from other readers when it was first out, all of it good. It took me a while to get around to it, but I’m glad I kept it on my radar and grabbed it up when I came across it not long ago—a perk of being slow off the mark is that I found the nice hardcover edition on a sale table! (I often wait for the paperback, not just because hardcovers are so expensive here now but because I just prefer holding and reading paperbacks. But there’s still something satisfying about a hardcover, isn’t there?) Trespasses was definitely worth reading, though it is rough going emotionally. I thought Kennedy’s strategy of leading off chapters with quick rundowns of news items, in the same way Cushla does this with her students, was a deft way of contextualizing the novel’s plot, but also of reminding us that the “news” is not something that happens only to other people. Often I did a double-take when I realized that what seemed like just one more item was something that had happened to one of the novel’s characters. The effect was a building sense of dread, which was exacerbated by the general expectation of some kind of catastrophe, an expectation established by the setting and the specific mix of characters in the novel.
Kennedy keeps us primarily focused on the very personal story of Cushla’s life and especially her relationship with Michael Agnew, but it is impossible for this story to be only personal, for two people to just be “themselves,” exempted from politics or society. It is hard not to feel angry and frustrated on their behalf at the prejudices and persecutions that they have to navigate, but at the same time Kennedy avoids trite “can’t we all just get along?” messages, not least because both Cushla and Michael have and act on ideas about how the world around them should be—they are not bystanders or neutral observers.
In contrast, I had never heard of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross Stitch when I first spotted it in the bookstore a couple of months ago. Its title caught my eye because I do cross stitch myself, though it has been a while since I picked up any of my works in progress. (As my eyes age, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever finish the series of Henry VIII and his six wives that I began around 30 years ago. But never say never! I bought one of those around-the-neck magnifiers and it may make all the difference.) The novel’s blurb was appealing, but it took me a few visits to decide to actually give it a try—and unlike A Month in the Country, which I hesitated over for so much longer, Cross Stitch was not so good that I wished I had read it sooner. It wasn’t bad; there were things I really liked about it. It is a bittersweet story about friendship and the odd and sometimes sad paths it can take as people grow up and apart. The three women (initially girls) at its center, Mila, Dalia, and Citlala, are avid embroiderers, and the novel intersperses its first-person narration (by Mila, the writer of the group, of course) with reflections on needlework, including quotations from scholars and critics and other writers who have offered ideas about its role in women’s lives and in cultural history. One of these sources is Roszika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch, which was also an important source for the chapter on needlework and historiography in my academic monograph.
But I couldn’t really see what the embroidery material, or the women’s stitching, meant to the story Barrera tells of their lives, even though some of the explicit comments she makes about stitching and (or vs) writing were clever or thought-provoking. “I’ve never, and will never, read one of those books on how to write fiction,” Mila remarks at one point,
but it occurs to me that a novel could be written based on the instructions in needlework manuals, taking the following statements as if they were wise, disinterested pieces of advice:
‘When embroidering the foundation, always use a sharp needle.’
‘Don’t pull the thread too tightly; if you do, the loop becomes narrow and the effect is lost.’
‘Do exactly the same but in mirror image, reducing by one line at each step.’
‘When you stop embroidering, the work should be taken from the frame to allow the cloth to breath.’
I wonder whether, if I reread Cross Stitch really attentively, I would find that she has applied these lessons to the novel she’s narrating. I don’t expect I will reread it, though: it just wasn’t engaging enough. It had very little momentum, something I should perhaps have anticipated from the way the text is broken up into smaller and larger pieces, separated (a bit too cutely?) by small images of a needle and thread. 
As a coming of age novel, Cross Stitch definitely had its interest for me: Barrera is Mexican (the novel is translated by Christina MacSweeney), so it comes at those themes from its own angle, including both the girls’ experiences growing up in Mexico and their travels to London and Paris. I never know with a translated novel how much of my experience of it is actually a result of the translation; I found Cross Stitch a bit stilted or flat, but that’s something I find with a lot of English novels these days too, as cool, crisp writing is very much in vogue, so it may be as much a decision about how to present Barrera’s writing as it is a reflection of what it’s like in the original.
Ah, those days . . . for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of hayfields ripe for harvest. And being young.
Throughout the novel there is a neat but never pat association between the restoration of the mural and Tom’s reconnection with a world full of life and colour—and along the way we get to follow Tom’s growing excitement about the painting itself, which he comes to believe is a true masterpiece:
June began slowly, as a reading month anyway, as I was in Vancouver for the first 10 days of it and, as is pretty typical on these trips, I was too busy to settle down with a book. I did read about half of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce on the plane, and most of Donna Leon’s Drawing Conclusions while I was there (I borrowed it from my parents’ well-stocked mystery shelves but did not manage to finish it before I left). I’m definitely not complaining! It was a cheerful visit, made more so because Maddie was with me and I loved sharing my favorite people and places with her. Because we were also sharing a suitcase, I was also very restrained and did not buy any books while I was there. The only one I acquired was a very cool gift from my mother: a second impression of the first edition of The Waves
, from the Hogarth Press. 
, that while all of its detail about the history and processes of the lumber industry in BC were interesting enough, the book also gave the impression of a single man’s story elaborated or built up with background and contexts until it made a large enough whole. Sometimes I just wanted to get on with the actual events!
On the approach to Richmond, they passed a sign, a large board with a map of the path they were following, the scrawled red line from west coast to east, an arrow two-thirds of the way across labelled ‘You Are Here’.
The other clever thing about You Are Here is how neatly the walking trip fits the underlying movement of both plot and character: that it’s obvious (in a novel, a literal journey is pretty much always also a metaphorical journey) doesn’t make it dull, and the gradual progress of our protagonists towards tolerance, then interest, then understanding, then liking, then affection as they trudge and clamber and stroll towards each new stopping point is well done. Even though it seemed pretty clear what their final destination was, the route they take to get there is not, unlike the literal journey, mapped out ahead of time, and it was satisfying arrivingthere with them after the requisite Big Misunderstanding.
Book blogging was easier, somehow, when I just wrote up every book I read as soon as I finished it. I was so much busier in other respects when I adopted that habit: looking back, I have now idea how I found the time for it. But one plausible theory is that I saved a lot of time not dithering about blogging! Just do it – good advice for so many things, including writing.
The novel’s non-stop melodrama is in service of a worldview, or an idea about human desires and instincts. I think possibly this sentence is key: “The door of terror opened over the black chasm of sex, love even unto death, destruction for fuller possession.” I hope the One Bright Pod folks (whose fault it is that I read this) will tell me if there is some kind of link to D. H. Lawrence here: it seems so to me, but I don’t know Lawrence well enough to be sure. I also hope they talk about what trains signify and how they are used in the novel. They are clearly (I think) symbols of modernity, but there is a lot more going on with them, especially the engine personified by one of the characters as a woman (“she” is perhaps his most genuinely caring relationship). Once I’d 
The other three books I’ve finished are Mollie Keane’s Good Behaviour (didn’t much like it, though I could see how skillful it is), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (found it boring even though I knew he was doing his withholding / unreliable narrator trick again so I knew that if I only understood what lay beneath the boring layer, it would be much more interesting – this is a risk he takes repeatedly, as I discussed in 
What’s next, you wonder? Maybe Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, which I picked up recently with a birthday gift card (thank you!), or something from my miscellaneous stack of library books. Living so close to the public library has made me pretty casual about taking things out that I may or may not commit to reading: I like having options! (If there’s anything there you think I should definitely try, let me know.) I also have Cold Comfort Farm to hand, which was my ‘Independent Bookstore Day’ treat – but I’m saving it to read on the plane when I go to Vancouver in a couple of weeks.
April hasn’t been a bad month for reading, overall. I’ve already written up Dorothy B. Hughes’s 
I read Maylis De Kerangal’s Eastbound in one sitting, not just because it’s short but because it’s very suspenseful and I really wanted to find out what happened! I ended up thinking that the novel’s success in this respect worked against the quality of my reading of it, because I didn’t linger over the aspects of the novel that make it more than just a thriller. The story is very simple: a young Russian soldier on a train to Siberia decides to go AWOL and is helped in his attempted escape by another passenger, a young French woman. Will he succeed, or will he be discovered and pay the price? Anxious to know, I paid less attention than I should have to the descriptions of the landscape scrolling past them – though I did appreciate them, I didn’t really think about them, and a reread of the novel would probably show me more metaphorical and historical layers to the characters’ journey. Some other time, maybe, as I had to return my copy to the library! But even my brisk reading showed me why 
My current reading is Shawna Lemay’s Apples on a Windowsill, which is (more or less) about still lifes as a genre, but which roams across a range of topics in a thoughtful and often beautifully meditative way. A sample:
Another car would have come along, a family car for which she had said she was waiting, or even another man, a white man. Most travelers, like most men, were intrinsically decent. The end result for Iris would have been the same, cruelly the same. But he needn’t have been involved. He was the wrong man to have played Samaritan, and he’d known it, known it there on the road and in every irreversible moment since.
There are many interesting aspects of the investigation that unfolds as Hugh (with painful inevitability) ends up the prime suspect in Iris’s death. I haven’t spent enough time with the novel at this point to be sure what to make of all of them, but one thing I’ll want to think more about is Ellen’s role, which doesn’t fit any of the usual restrictive hard-boiled parts for women to play. It seems tied to the novel’s attention to class, which, as Mosley notes in his Afterword to the NYRB edition, does not protect Hugh the way he hopes it will: his education and career path, his family’s money and social standing—none of it insulates him from hatred or suspicion. But Ellen’s money and connections are sources of strength, as is her prompt and unequivocal commitment to being on Hugh’s side. If Iris can be seen as a version of the damsel-in-distress turned femme fatale (intentionally or not), Ellen is an ally and partner for Hugh, one who refuses to sit on the sidelines while an injustice is perpetrated. There are other details worth considering about who helps Hugh and who doesn’t, too, including the white lawyer whose motives are primarily political, rather than principled.
The thing that does make me hesitate is the oddity (arguably) of assigning a novel that is fundamentally about race, and that is told from the point of view of a Black man—but which is written by a white woman. “A white woman writing of a young black man’s problems with the law was a certain kind of gamble,” Mosley comments in his Afterword—but Mosley himself doesn’t seem to consider it problematic, moving immediately on to remark Hughes’s general interest in writing “from perspectives far from her own.” It is clear from the afterword that Mosley greatly admires Hughes in general and The Expendable Man in particular. What kind of representation is more important, in a class like mine that tries to show the range of uses to which the forms of detective fiction have been put since its emergence as a distinct form? It seems as if Mosley would consider it most important to address “the darker reality” (as he puts it) that lies behind more “glittering versions of American life.” Presumably he thinks the gamble paid off for Hughes because the result was a very good novel.
This term is the first one since I began posting about ‘this week in my classes’ in 2007 that I haven’t posted at all about my classes. What’s up with that, you might wonder? Well, more likely you hadn’t noticed or wondered, but I’ve certainly been aware of it and pondering what, if anything, to do about it.
It certainly isn’t anything to do with this term’s classes. At least from my perspective, both of them—Mystery & Detective Fiction and The Victorian ‘Woman Question’—have gone very well. Of course there have been the occasional sessions that dragged a bit, and we had an unusually high number of snow days that created a lot of logistical headaches, but in general discussion was both substantive and lively. I continue to try to wean myself from my lecture notes. This gets easier and easier in the mystery class, as I am pretty confident now both about how I want to frame the course and readings in terms of ‘big picture’ issues and about the specific readings. (I mix in new options quite regularly, because for various reasons I have been teaching the course basically every year for ages, so this definitely keeps it fresh and interesting for me: I just finished reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man and I’m 90% certain I’m putting it on the reading list for next year, for one!) The ‘woman question’ class is a seminar, so I don’t lecture there anyway; I so looked forward to our class meetings all term, both because the readings are all favorites of mine and because we always had such good conversations about them. The only slight exception was with the excerpts from Aurora Leigh, from which I learned both that assigning excerpts is a bad idea (something I already believed but overrode, for practical reasons)—when it comes to long texts, do or do not, there is no try!—and that narrative poetry is hard, or at least it takes a different kind of preparation and attention than fiction, and that if I’m going to assign any of Aurora Leigh I need to take that into account.
So what’s my problem this term? I think it is rooted in my uncertainty about how to address some big changes that have taken place in my personal life. When I wrote up my 
In my current circumstances, this principle, if that’s what it is, runs up against the principle that I shouldn’t talk about other people’s business here: it feels wrong not to acknowledge that my life has changed significantly, but I have felt—rightly, I think—constrained from going into any detail that might cross the line, which has also meant I have felt constrained from talking about some of my recent reading as frankly and completely as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t address how something like, say, Maggie Smith’s 
Obviously I have reached a point at which it seems fine and reasonable to say what has been going on, though I don’t expect I will ever consider Novel Readings an appropriate place to talk about how or why things have unfolded in this way, or even how I feel about it all! That’s nobody’s business but ours, by which I mean mine and my (truly excellent) therapist’s. 😉 Seriously, though, I do believe we bring our whole selves to our reading, so what I want to work on is how to acknowledge how my new reality sometimes does affect my engagement with books. I can say already that nothing about Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, which I just read for my book club, seems relevant or resonant at all in that way (though I did enjoy it on its own terms)—though there were moments in 
After college, for a period of two years and eight months, the “real world” became a room at Beth Israel Hospital and Tom’s one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Never mind that I was starting out at a glamorous job in a midtown skyscraper; it was these quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace, and loss—and, I suspected, about the meaning of art.
The individual sections of All the Beauty in the World are organized, more or less, around Bringley’s assignments to particular rooms or wings or exhibits; the larger framing is his gradual reconciliation, if that’s the right word, with the “real world” outside the museum as he learns to live with Tom’s loss. Both the people he works with (who come from all parts of the world and all have their own stories about how they came to be standing guard over Van Gogh’s Irises or the tomb of Perneb) and the people he encounters as visitors all play a part in this emotional journey, but it is the art that matters the most, in ways that are better suited to samples than summaries. Here, for instance, is Bringley’s description of a silk scroll hand-painted by Guo Xi, a “Northern Song Dynasty” master:
And so he leaves this job too. From now on when he returns to the museum it will be as a visitor, just another person stepping inside for a moment to be reminded of the obvious, and to be reassured
Novel Readings 