Novel Readings

“To Face the Enemy”: Anita Brookner, Look At Me

October 8, 2023Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And, in a way, that bends time, so long as it is remembered, it will indicate the future. It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget, to cultivate the art of forgetting. To remember is to face the enemy. The truth lies in remembering.

I decided to read Anita Brookner’s Look At Me after hearing Trevor read an excerpt from it on the Mookse and Gripes episode about favorite passages. This is what he read:

And I did not write for many evenings that followed. In my new security I began to see it all in a different light. I began to hate that inner chemical excitement that made me run the words through in my head while getting ready to set them down on the page; I felt a revulsion against the long isolation that writing imposes, the claustration, the sense of exclusion; I felt a thrill of distaste for the alternative life that writing is supposed to represent. It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want.’ Or, indeed, ‘Look at me.’ And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.

Who could hear or read that and not be devastated by it? It’s an absolutely ruthless declaration of bitterness, alienation, and loneliness. Maybe it’s perverse that I wanted to go to this place, to meet this person for myself, to find out how her story surrounds this moment, to understand what kind of life encompasses it. Probably I would not have been tempted down this sad path by any other novelist, but Brookner is a maestro of misery—not the screaming or wailing kinds but the stealthily accumulating, erosive kinds—and in other novels she brings to her exploration of this grim territory a faint redemptive sympathy for her sad characters.

brookner1 Does she do this for Frances, the wary, lonely narrator of Look At Me? Do we—should we—find compassion in our hearts for her? There’s definitely something pathetic about her, as we follow her through her unexpected and initially life-affirming friendship with Nick and Alix Fraser, who are so much brighter and more beautiful and more exciting than she is:

I slipped into the routine of dining with the Frasers, scarcely believing my good fortune. I registered with amazement the fact that Alix seemed to have taken to me, and that Nick accepted my presence in their flat without comment . . . I don’t think I was forcing my company on them, although I was avid for theirs.

What do they see in her? It is difficult (rightly so, it eventually proves) to take their interest in her at face value, as genuine friendship: she’s an audience, a useful hanger-on, a pet, a project, an object of quizzical condescension. Perhaps there is kindness there, but the Frasers (and Alix especially) are so self-centered that Fanny’s groveling readiness to accept any terms they offer becomes increasingly depressing.

villette-charlotte-bronte-paperback-cover-art And yet Fanny’s motives and character also seem uncomfortable: she is manipulative, jealous, reticent to a fault. I’m not sure she’s meant to be an unreliable narrator, strictly speaking, but she’s certainly not a trustworthy one. She reminds me very much of Lucy Snowe in Villette, cast in the role of a spectator to life, showing strength and resilience but also stubbornness, bitterness, and even malice as she endures her marginalization and denies her own desires, even to herself. Just as Lucy watches Dr. John fall in love with Ginevra, insisting all the while that her own heart is untouched, so Fanny refuses to admit her love for James Anstey, only eventually to realize that if he did ever have romantic feelings for her (which I’m not sure of, really), the moment for claiming them has irrevocably passed. Lucy and Fanny also both endure an absolutely nightmarish walk through their city, so overcome with their own emotions that it makes them physically ill. Here’s Fanny, making her way home across London late at night after seeing James in love (or lust, anyway), with another woman:

I was not very fast now, and my feet stumbled from time to time. I went past the sex shop, and the television rental company, past the ethnic hairdresser, whose fluorescent tube in the window blinked weakly, lessening my feelings of total desertion. I greeted the wax nurse in her spectral uniform like an old friend. I passed the banks and the supermarkets and the mysterious shops which seemed to have an air of dereliction about them and whose normal purposes I could now no longer remember. The rain had stopped but my coat was damp and it impeded me. I felt intimations of nightmare; I seemed to be making no headway. It was as if I were trying to wade through some viscous substance wearing an old-fashioned diving suit. There was no one in sight. There was no sound, apart from a distant rumble, which I could not identify. I was breathing harshly now and I could feel a pain in my chest; my hair stuck to my damp face in wisps, and I was very thirsty.

At the end of the walk she is home again, but there is no sense of comfort or reassurance: her flat is the life she doesn’t want, with its stasis and isolation and memories of illness and death. She tries to sleep, and waking up brings new pain as she forgets for a moment how bad everything is (“as if I were on holiday, being cared for, with a day full of surprises and treats ahead”) and then remembers again: “I think this is one of the cruelest tricks we play on ourselves,” she reflects, “this inability to banish early expectation.”

brookner3 Writing, for Fanny, is no balm, no refuge, only a retreat—though I think we are meant to take Look At Me as a sign that it can also be revenge. I find myself wondering (not knowing much at all about Brookner herself) how she talked about her own writing. The passage Trevor read is such a crushing statement about writing as the last resort of the outcast. I’m reminded of a passage from Hotel du Lac that I often think about, spoken by Edith, the “romantic fiction” writer who is the protagonist of the novel:

In my books it is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course . . . In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Axiomatically . . . hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.

Look At Me offers no such consolation, especially if you recognize anything of yourself in “Little Orphan Fanny.” Fanny is a tortoise to the end, but her only victory is having the last word.

“The Light of the World”: Nicola Griffith, Hild

October 4, 2023October 4, 2023Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

The publication of Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, made this seem like a good time to re-run this earlier post on Griffith’s wonderful novel.

I found Hild shelved in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section at Bookmark, which means I almost didn’t realize they had it in stock, as I don’t usually browse that section. (I was poking around in case they had John Crowley’s Little, Big, which Tom had got me interested in.) I can see why the staff had put it there: the front cover blurb compares it to The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But it isn’t fantasy: it’s historical fiction, if based, Griffith says in her Author’s Note, on a particularly scanty record: “We have no idea what [Hild] looked like, what she was good at, whether she married or had children.” “But clearly,” Griffith goes on, “she was extraordinary,” and that’s certainly true of the protagonist Griffith has created from the sparse materials available.

Maybe, though, considering Hild “fantasy” is not altogether a category mistake. “I made it up,” Griffith says about her story, while explaining that it is also deeply researched: “I learnt what I could of the late sixth and early seventh centuries: ethnography, archaeology, poetry, numismatics, jewellery, textiles, languages, food production, weapons, and more. And then I re-created that world . . . ” — that is, she engaged in “worldbuilding,” which is a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental?) task of the fantasy or science fiction author. Of course, her world is built out of real pieces, but it’s an artificial construction nonetheless. I suppose this could be said of any historical fiction, or any fiction at all, so maybe I’m trying to blur a line that’s already indistinct. But there’s something about Hild — the strangeness of its world, but also of Griffith’s evocation of it — that makes it haunting and uncanny, as if we are not so much in an earlier version of our own world but in an alternative version.

It’s mostly Hild herself who’s responsible for that sense that we’re looking through, rather than at, the world: she is the king’s “seer,” the “light of the world,” and thus it is her job, her destiny, her “wyrd” or fate, to perceive the world differently than others. She is constantly seeking patterns, in nature and in the shifting relationships of the court and the kingdom. Her powers of perception set her apart: she is admired, revered, and feared. Her gifts are not necessarily supernatural, though: her “visions” are the results of long thought and sharp intelligence, and sometimes they are also simply predictions shaped to suit what her listeners (especially the King) want most to hear or do. Signs and omens must be interpreted, and that too requires political savvy and deft diplomacy more than any preternatural insight. Hild’s status as the King’s “light” defines her from birth and shapes both how she is treated and how she must behave: it is a burden, a responsibility, a terrible risk and a great liberation, because it exempts her from the ordinary constraints of a woman’s life. Menewood

Hild is an extraordinary character: strong, charismatic, intelligent, intensely physical, remarkably whole and convincing. One of the most interesting aspects of her characterization is the novel’s certainty about her woman’s body: it’s a central fact of her life and Griffith makes that clear without apology, voyeurism, or special pleading. I can’t think, for instance, of another novel in which starting to menstruate is a plot point in quite the way it is here — incorporated with perfect naturalness into the ongoing story of the heroine’s physical and psychological maturation, experienced as an initiation into an alliance of other women, associated with independence from authority rather than readiness for male sexual attention. That’s not to say that sexuality isn’t also an important part of Hild’s story, but though there is a love story of sorts running through the novel, her desires are hers, physical feelings she can satisfy on her own, or with women: they are not (or not just) ties that bind her emotionally to a man, and they certainly do not define her ambitions or determine the arc of her story.

The shape of that story is only partially revealed by the end of Hild. (Griffith is working on the sequel now, but I almost wish she’d waited and published one epic novel, as Hild so obviously stops rather than concludes.) Hild eventually becomes Saint Hilda of Whitby, but she isn’t there when we leave her this time. What we have seen to this point, though, is her development from an uncanny child into a fierce woman. The overall trajectory of Hild is all upward in that way: not just Hild herself, but the world she lives in is taking on a different form over the novel. The most important change is the rise of Christianity, which is gradually replacing the old forms of worship which Hild, as a seer, initially represents and serves. The transition is an uneven and not entirely welcome one. For one thing, people are reluctant to give up their old beliefs, and the representatives of the new God are not altogether persuasive. The God they represent, too, is very different from the old gods, who were more personal and more fun. “They don’t like jokes,” says one of Hild’s women about the Christians; “I don’t think their god does either.” And the new God is demanding in unfamiliar ways, insisting on obedience and reverence, and preoccupied with the unfamiliar notion of original sin. He’s also “squeamish,” inexplicably hostile to women’s bodies: “No blood in the church. No woman with her monthly bleeding. It makes no sense,” says Hild’s friend.

Will this new God diminish or invalidate Hild’s power, as a seer or as a woman? Will He punish her, perhaps, for the evils she has committed as a warrior or a prophet of other gods? Hild approaches her own baptism with trepidation, but then feels renewed courage:

She breathed deep. She was Anglisc. She would not burn. She would endure and hold true to her oath. An oath, a bond. A truth, a guide, a promise. To three gods in one. To the pattern. For even gods were part of the pattern, even three-part gods. The pattern was in everything. Of everything. Over everything. . . .

Her heart beat with it, her tears fell with it, her spirit soared with it. Here, now, they were building a great pattern, she could feel it, and she would trace its shape one day: that was her wyrd, and fate goes as ever it must. Today she was swearing to it, swearing here, with her people.

I wondered (given that she becomes a Christian saint) whether Hild’s baptism would stand as an epiphanic moment of faith — as a revelation. While the language and the mood here is uplifted, though, the strongest sense is one of continuity: “she was still herself,” the scene concludes. Christianity never seems to be the one right way: it’s just another way, and one that is as prone as the old ways to express the will, greed, and ambition of its adherents rather than any divine plan. Hild’s strength continues to be herself — her limbs, trained for fighting, and her mind, astute and endlessly observing.

The other thing that’s rising in the world of the novel is literacy. This is tied to Christianity, in that it’s the priests who are usually the most ‘lettered’ of the characters. But Hild quickly perceives the value of writing as a way of maintaining networks across distances. Her ability to read and write is valuable to her politically, as her success and survival as a seer depends on good and abundant information. But it means most to her personally, as the typical fate of women is to be sent far from home and family in their roles as “peaceweavers,” cementing alliances as wives then securing kingdoms with their heirs. Hild realizes that if she could write, for instance, to her married sister Hereswith, Hereswith “wouldn’t be lost to her”: for someone in Hild’s anomalous and therefore lonely position, letters would be a lifeline, bringing her news and also preserving her own private identity while living among those to whom she is “the maid who killed, the maid who felt nothing. The maid with no mother or sister or friend.”

kinghereafter The novelist Griffith most reminds me of is Dorothy Dunnett. She luxuriates in tactile details the way Dunnett does, for one thing, as in this description of a waterfront marketplace:

Rhenish glass: cups and bowls and flasks. Wheel-thrown pottery, painted in every colour and pattern. Cloth. Swords — swords for sale — and armor. Jewels, with stones Hild had never seen, including great square diamonds, as grey as a Blodmonath sky. Perfume in tiny stoppered jars, and next to them even smaller jars — one the size of Hild’s fingernail — sealed with wax: poison. . . . A six-stringed lyre inlaid with walnut and copper, and the beaver-skin bag to go with it. A set of four nested silver bowls from Byzantium, chased and engraved with lettering that Fursey, peering over her shoulder, said was Greek. But Hild barely heard him: Somewhere a man was calling in a peculiar cadence, and he sounded almost Anglisc. Almost. Instead of the rounded thump of Anglisc, these oddly shaped words rolled just a little wrong. Not apples, she thought. Pears. Heavy at the bottom, longer on the top.

The extraordinary complexity of the created world is also reminiscent of Dunnett — the intricate family trees, the tangled web of alliances, the unfamiliarity of the names and vocabulary, and thus the associated down side of such authorial mastery: our (or at any rate, my) difficulty keeping track of who’s who, of who’s doing what to whom and why. Like King Hereafter, for example, Hild is full of passages that perplex rather than clarify the action:

As the weather improved, messages began to come in from all over the isle. Two, from Rheged and from Alt Clut, said the same thing: Eochaid Buide of the Dál Riate was sending an army to aid the Cenél Cruithen against Fiachnae mach Demmáin of the Dál Fiatach, and chief among the Dál Riatan war band were the Idings — though the man from Rheged thought two, Oswald and Osric, called the Burnt, while the messenger from Alt Clut thought three, Oswald, Osric the Burnt, and young Osbald.

Or how about this one;

The murdered Eorpwald had been the godson of Edwin. Sigebert was of a different Christian lineage. he had spent his time across the narrow sea at the Frankish court of Clothar, and now Dagobert. If Sigebert was bringing threescore men, they would be Dagobert’s. If he won with their help, he would be obliged to align himself with the Franks. What would that mean for Edwin? Where was Dagobert in relation to the growing alliances of the middle country and the west — Penda and Cadwallon — and the men of the north: Idings, Picts, Scots of Dál Riata, Alt Clut, perhaps Rheghed?

Where was Dagobert, indeed? It helped a bit when I found a partial guide to pronunciation in the back of the book, and a glossary, and there’s a family tree too, but my experience reading Dunnett helped the most, particularly my conclusion that I don’t need to keep up with all the details to stay interested. Both authors are good enough story tellers that the necessary drama rises above the morass of confusing specifics. If I didn’t always know exactly why Hild was fighting someone in particular, it was enough to know that she had her reasons: the heat and blood of the battle was no less intense because I had to suspend, not disbelief, but my desire for perfect comprehension. The absolutely key characters — her mother Breguswith, her best friend, sparring partner, half-brother, and eventual husband Cian, or her “gemaecce” (“female partner”) Begu, for instance — are wholly distinct, and above it all is always Hild herself, “the pattern-making mind of the world.”

As you might expect, I am very much looking forward to reading Menewood!

This post was first published on May 31, 2015.

“Little Failures”: Claudia Piñeiro, A Little Luck

September 24, 2023Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

pineiroluck Like Elena Knows, A Little Luck is a small book that packs a powerful punch. Now that the first impact of reading it has passed, I do find myself wondering: did it earn its effect? Is that even a fair question? But Elena Knows is about so much: so much is at stake in it. A Little Luck, in contrast, strikes me (though only after the fact, after the immersive experience of reading it) as founded on something slighter, something that maybe can’t quite hold up the weight Piñeiro brings to bear on it. But there’s no denying what an intense and gripping novel it is in the moment.

A Little Luck is about an accident. After the fact, again, I think the way Piñeiro spools out information about it is a bit too manipulative. We return over and over to the moment it happens, each time gaining a bit more information. On the other hand, that’s how traumatic memory works, and the strategy does force the reader into questions, not just about what happened, but about the role of the narrator, first introduced to us as Mary Lohan—about the way she is haunted by it, and the price she pays for it, which it also takes a while for Piñeiro to fully reveal.

Like Elena Knows, A Little Luck turns out to be about motherhood, and (also like Elena Knows) about ways it can go awry and lead to pain on both sides. “Most mothers,” Mary reflects,

never have to go through such terrible circumstances to prove they can be a mother. But life decided to test me, and I, in so many ways, failed.

Did she fail? I think that is one of the novel’s central questions, and Mary’s own answer changes over its course. Arguably, she passed the test with flying colors by unequivocally putting what she believed to be the best interests of her son Federico first by, paradoxically, abandoning him: “I knew I was hurting my child by leaving,” she says, “but by staying I might hurt him even more.” Was it the right decision? Was it the wrong decision? Or was it, like so many decisions we make, the only decision she could make in that moment, under those circumstances? “Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed,” Mary observes;

If the circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would’ve ever known who I could become.

Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test.

I only have a little luck.

Mary—or Marilé, to give her back the name she gave up along with Federico—made an innocuous-seeming decision, one she had made often before and that others also make just moments before she does, with no bad outcomes. The difference is a bit of bad luck, a series of small but incredibly unfortunate events, and thus a massive, irreparable catastrophe. One life is lost, other lives are ruined, and Marilé gives her own life up, which is the closest thing she can imagine to making some kind of restitution:

Not being there, that was the kind of suffering I deserved. To keep on living, without him. Much worse that suicide, without a doubt. An endless, bottomless pain. The agony of never being able to hug him again.

Piñeiro is really brilliant at immersing us in both moral uncertainty and psychic pain. The suspense of the novel comes eventually from wondering if Marilé has any chance at genuine redemption, but the overall emotional effect of it comes from inhabiting her tormented mind, or really her relentless grieving conscience. Happiness has come to her since she abandoned Federico and Marilé to become Mary—the storyline around this is kind of thin and relies heavily on complete coincidence or, to keep within the novel’s terms of reference, an enormous stroke of good luck. What she really wants, though, remains off limits, or so she assumes until she returns to the place she used to live, dreading recognition.

It’s recognition that brings about reconciliation, though, and I found myself wondering if I had been taken in a bit by Mary’s insistent attention to all the efforts she has gone to not to be known. Surely she is actually hoping for just such an outcome, even though she wouldn’t dare admit it to herself? As for the novel’s resolution, again the set-up itself is a bit thin or overelaborate, but it felt so true, and I was glad, given how agonized so much of the novel is, that it ended with a moment of happiness.

This Week In My Classes: Innumerable Bees

September 20, 2023September 21, 2023Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

BEES I’ve always loved these lines from Tennyson’s The Princess:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

All those soft sounds: how gentle and enticing! But unfortunately they are on my mind right now because I’ve been feeling so overwhelmed with the start of term: it’s my head that seems full of buzzing bees, and that is not so pleasant.

The start of term is always chaotic, and really overall things are going fine, I think. Maybe it’s age that makes me more aware, in a worried sort of way, of just how many moving parts there are, of how many balls I have to keep in the air at all times just to keep myself and my students on track. I used to trust myself to do it all, but these days my executive function and memory just aren’t what they used to be. Announcements and assignments, lecture notes and handouts, attendance lists and spreadsheets, slides and quizzes and worksheets—oh my!

Actually, thinking about it now, maybe there are more moving parts than there used to be. Once upon a time we didn’t use an LMS, for example, and while there’s no doubt that Brightspace (formerly Blackboard formerly Web CT formerly DIY websites) is a useful back-up system for in-person courses—a storage facility available to your students 24/7 so they can never not locate their syllabus!—it’s also the case that expectations have gone up considerably around our use of them (and students’ reliance on them). Now I post my PPT slides on Brightspace after class, for example, something that requires multiple additional steps, assuming I remember to do it in the first place. (I never used to use PowerPoint, either, and I blame it and Brightspace, which both require incessant mousing, for my now chronic shoulder pain.) I used to give quizzes and midterms in class; now, they are all taken in Brightspace—but that too means many more steps than devising the questions and making copies, setting up all the many features just right and entering the questions in the optimal way. When we were all online, I posted weekly announcements for my classes: it turns out students really appreciated these, so I’ve kept doing them, but they take me (no kidding) hours to compose, both to make sure they are optimally clear and useful and because heaven forbid there’s a mistake in one, like a wrong deadline, that gets fixed in their minds or calendars in spite of any subsequent efforts to correct it! Recently, too, in a departmental discussion around class size and workload, one of my colleagues pointed out ruefully that “there didn’t used to be email” and that is such a good point, especially as our class sizes have gone up even as we became not just teachers but customer service representatives! (And yet somehow, without an LMS and without Outlook and without PowerPoint, we managed to do our jobs. Imagine that. Did we do a worse job? Maybe in some respects—accessibility seems like a key point here—but I really do wonder how much all of this apparatus actually helps, rather than hinders, us in our core mission.)

pride-and-prejudice-penguin How are things going otherwise in my classes? So far 19th-Century Fiction seems great (I hope it’s not just me who thinks so!). It’s the Austen to Dickens version this term, and I took the risk of assigning Pride and Prejudice, which as regular readers will know I sometimes shy away from, not because I don’t love it but because it’s too popular! It is so delightful, though, and I figured that given <waves hand around> the state of everything, personally and generally, there couldn’t be such a thing as too much enthusiasm. Good call, is my current impression. There is so much positive energy in the room! Last year in Dickens to Hardy it sometimes seemed like such a struggle, despite there being so many keen students in the class; and it was so discouraging to watch attendance dwindle, especially during our time on Middlemarch, which I had been so looking forward to. I really hope we can sustain the current level of engagement when we move on to Jane Eyre next week. It can be self-fulfilling: if it’s fun to come to class, people keep coming. So that’s my goal!

1015StartHere-crop My other class this term is a section of intro, once again the prosaically-named “Literature: How It Works.” But this time it’s in person, because I was so disheartened by the end of last year’s online version that I couldn’t face doing it that way again. I spent a lot of time this summer thinking about how to revamp my specifications grading model to incorporate in-person components. I feel a bit guilty about the amount of paper I’m using up as a result, but I am hopeful that it will pay off in terms of attendance and engagement and in building skills and instilling confidence so that they realize they don’t need to look everything up online but can learn to do the work of literary analysis themselves and get more out of it in the process. We’ll see! I always start with poetry, and we’ve done some bangers already, including Seamus Heaney’s “Digging” and “The Grauballe Man”; “My Last Duchess”; “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; and today, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Judging from our class discussions so far, it does seem to me that not everyone (ahem) is actually doing the reading before class, something I hope the in-class exercises will encourage them to do more consistently. I wonder if the need to do that advance work seems less pressing when it’s “just one poem,” and so it gets shunted aside for “harder” homework. There are definitely hands going up when I pose questions, though, and it’s early yet: my job here is to make it seem necessary to come prepared but also safe to try out preliminary or uncertain ideas, since so much of the real teaching and learning happens in those exchanges. collins

It was a bit of a rough summer, so in some ways I welcome the demands and distractions of the term. As it all settles into routine, the buzzing will hopefully subside into a manageable murmur. I have some other things on the go as well, most immediately a review of David Bergen’s Away from the Dead for the Literary Review of Canada—it’s my first time writing for them, so I’d like to do a good job! I also spent a couple of enjoyable hours recently in interviews with some folks who are putting together a documentary on Wilkie Collins for the CBC show Ideas. I’m just one of several interviewees, so I don’t know how much of me you’ll actually hear when it airs, which will be sometime early in 2024, in honor of his bicentenary. I don’t seem to be reading much (except for work, of course) but when I am, it’s either Loretta Chase’s Carsington series for relaxation (Mr. Impossible is still my favorite!) or Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck, which seems likely to be every bit as good as Betty Boo. Maybe this weekend I can settle down enough to finish it, and then write it up properly here, the way a real book blogger should!

Summer (Reading) 2023

September 7, 2023Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

LastRose2013 It used to be a ritual for me to post a recap of my summer reading once autumn rolled around again, on the theory that people’s online attention is (rightly!) spottier in the summer and there might be some folks who would like to see what they missed around here. I didn’t do that last year, not because I didn’t read anything last summer but because last year just moving forward from month to month was hard enough, with the backwards drag of grieving, not to look back for other reasons. I’m still mourning—I will always mourn—but as time passes I am more able to be here, now, in the moment, in my moments. I think often these days of Julia Copus’s “The Grievers,” especially these lines:

What we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It’s truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves . . .

That quiet qualifier “at times” is the key. I am grateful for those times; I have also learned that they take work, and that they can exact a cost.

Anyway, here I am, still, or again, with another new term unfolding in front of me and another summer of reading—some good, some not so good—behind me. I’ll mostly just walk through the highlights here; anyone who wants to do a deep dive can always use the ‘archives’ menu (on the right sidebar) to browse by month. (I don’t really imagine that anyone would want to do that! But you could, or use the “categories” tags, or the index.) Missing Word

Two of the best books I read this summer were about grieving mothers. I didn’t pick them for that reason, although one of them, The Missing Word, was recommended to me by a thoughtful friend who thought it might resonate with my own loss—which it did. The Missing Word is slight but powerful, a wrenching but delicate attempt to “say out loud, dry-eyed, the things that can’t be said.” The other, Valerie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers, is more capacious and perhaps, as a result, a bit messier, less controlled. Thinking about the two novels together, I would say that this difference in scope and style reflects their aspirations: De Gregorio especially is trying to stay “dry-eyed” while saying unbearable things, while Perrin is making room for new, fresh possibilities.

Another couple of stand-out reads were two novels by Olivia Manning. I have written here and elsewhere about her Balkan and Levant trilogies, and about the excellent biography of her by Deirdre David, but I hadn’t really ventured into her other fiction before. I was not disappointed: both School for Love and The Doves of Venus are excellent, and both have something of the odd, unsettling quality that makes her more famous series so distinctively good.

Betty-Boo-Smaller Like everyone else I know, I was really impressed by Elena Knows; it was a treat to find that Piniero’s Betty Boo is also excellent, and to find Some Luck in stock at Bookmark last week—I am looking forward to reading it soon. And the last really good, or at least really enjoyable, read of this summer was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

I read a lot of perfectly fine books this summer, including Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen, Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, and Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point. I read some that I had high expectations for but that didn’t live up to them: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Hernan Diaz’s Trust, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. I read a couple of books that unfortunately I just didn’t like at all, notably Hannah Kent’s Devotion and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose. And I read some books for published reviews, including Christine Higdon’s Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, which I quite liked, Elizabeth Ruth’s Semi-Detached, which I also quite liked, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which is very good (my review of this one will be in next week’s TLS).

Overall it was a decent reading summer. I read less than some years, but more than last year, and with more—more what? I want to say something like more capacity, meaning nothing about the quantity of books I read but something about the available space in me, space to receive them. That capacity is still not what it was (I am not what I was). I notice that I am less patient, and so sometimes less persistent. I hope that my grief hasn’t made me an ungenerous reader. I suspect that some of my current reactions are related to grief: I find in particular that I am allergic to magical thinking in books—including Devotion or Semi-Detached (or, in parts, North Woods)—that otherwise deal in wholly human or natural problems. De Gregorio doesn’t resort to wish-fulfillment or fantasy and that is both the pain and the strength of her treatment of love and loss.

I played Poetry Serendipity often this summer, as I passed through the library for one reason or another. I’ll close with some lines from an enigmatic poem by Marianne Moore called “Picking and Choosing” that is about (I think, and among other things) why and how we read what we read.

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
The situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
What one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. . . .
We are not daft about the meaning,
but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one.
Humming-bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put us on the scent.
“A right good salvo of barks,” a few strong wrinkles puckering
the skin between the ears, is all we ask.

The Last Books of Summer

September 4, 2023September 5, 2023Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

last-roses-of-summer My last two reads of this summer were Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. For me, one was a hit, the other a miss.

I began The Book of Goose with enthusiasm; sadly, it dwindled as the book went on. It’s often hard to put my finger on exactly why I don’t like a novel (as opposed to why I don’t like a particular feature of a novel, as with the ghostly illogic that put me off Devotion). When it happens, I always wonder if more time and effort would turn things around—but when I’m reading just for myself, there’s no real incentive to go to that kind of trouble, and there are enough books that do work for me more or less immediately that I don’t worry too much that I’m somehow missing out. A lot of readers I respect think very highly of Yiyun Li (in response to my “meh” judgment on Twitter, Catherine Taylor, for one, commented that “She’s an amazing writer”—though the novel she highlighted was The Vagrants, which I haven’t read but she said is, in her opinion, “pretty much one of the best novels of the last 20 years”). I was very moved (both before and after Owen’s death) by Where Reasons End, but I have DNF’d Must I Go twice now. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign, but I heard part of a podcast interview with Li about The Book of Goose and it intrigued me, and the premise seemed promising.

li-goose Another warning sign should have been how many reviews (including some quoted in the pages of “Praise for The Book of Goose” that lead off my paperback edition) compare it to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I am cynical about these tendentious excerpts so I don’t pay very close attention to them when I’m making up my mind about what to read. Maybe I should change my habits! Because the Ferrante comparison occurred to me not too far into Li’s novel, and not for good reasons. (I’m not a fan.) Mostly it’s because of Fabienne, the strange, fierce, often cruel best friend of the narrator Agnès, who has the kind of willful wildness that Ferrante too seems to find, if not attractive, at least appealing, or compelling. I can’t imagine being friends with such a person in real life, and the recoil she caused made it equally hard to imagine why Agnès was so devoted to her in her world. Their friendship has a lot of the push-pull of Ferrante’s protagonists, and there are some similar themes about writing and identity and competition and contested narratives. (When people write about these books as if they reveal some essential truth about women’s friendships, I am baffled: is this really what their friendships are like?) For a while I was engaged enough in the graphic account of village life in post-war France, but the “game” of “let’s write a book” seemed forced to me, an awkward device to generate plot, conflict, and metafiction. Agnès’s time in England seemed similarly wooden to me; her correspondence with Fabienne and the fictional Jacques also seemed too much like a gimmick to stir up potential interpretation. Is The Book of Goose really a high concept novel, or is it trying (and failing) to be one? A lot of critics considered it the former, but I wasn’t convinced and (worst of all) before it was over I had lost interest in figuring it out.

Tom Lake was a much more enjoyable read, although like the other Patchett novels I have read recently, it didn’t seem to me to go particularly deep. Still, there was something really satisfying about it: I liked it a lot more than either Commonwealth or The Dutch House (though not as much as I remember liking Bel Canto). It has in common with The Book of Goose an interest in how we look back at the past and use what we remember to give shape and meaning to the present. It’s also, I think, about the roles we play and how they can either trap or liberate us, a theme it literalizes through its theatrical contexts and plotlines. How do we know who we really are, or who we might be? How do we navigate a world in which people, looking at us but not really knowing us, cast us in their own ongoing dramas? Patchett has too light a touch to lean hard into these kinds of thematic or (at their deepest) existential questions: mostly, she just tells a story about people with interesting but also somehow very ordinary lives. A story like this one, about choosing family and farming over fame and fortune, might have been told as shadowed with complications, perhaps regret about the road not traveled, or yearning for lost love, but Patchett’s version is airy and confident: the path taken is unequivocally the right one, which makes the notes of nostalgia unthreatening to present happiness. For a pandemic novel, it’s actually remarkably sunny: there’s really no hint of danger, certainly no sign of illness. Is that escapism? If so, is there something wrong with it? Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.

“A deeper mystery”: Hannah Kent, Devotion

August 23, 2023August 23, 2023Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I was raised with the kind of faith that does not doubt. God had been as much a part of me as my own marrow, and when I discovered my bones to be empty, fluting music discordant to anything I had sung in church, my anguish was real . . . The understanding I have now, that the world spins on a deeper mystery than anything that might be set into language, was not with me then. Now I know that my mind is too small to hold the spirit. The spirit, I hope, holds me.

I had high hopes of Devotion. I really liked Hannah Kent’s moody historical mystery Burial Rites, and I also liked her next novel, The Good People, quite a lot (details here). Devotion has a lot of the strengths of Kent’s earlier books, especially in its evocation of a particular time and place and its imaginative entry into the lives and minds of people who live then and there, not here and now.

Devotion is about a community of 19th-century Lutherans who, marginalized and persecuted in Germany, emigrate to Australia. The first part of the novel introduces us to them and their village, and especially to our narrator, Hanne, and her family, and their new neighbors, Thea and her family. If I hadn’t lost patience so utterly with the novel (for reasons I’ll get to in a minute) I would go into more detail about this part, and then about the next part, when they are all crammed onto the ship making its arduous way to Australia. All of this is rendered in meticulous detail; Hanne, the first-person narrator, is an appealing protagonist, a bit of an outsider, yearning for things she can’t quite articulate; her relationship with Thea feels real, and meaningful, and precious. Kent is good at so many things! But.

OK, here’s the thing. I know you should not complain that a book is what it is, instead of what you wanted it to be or think it should have been. But. Devotion is (almost) a good historical novel and a compelling love story. But. It has this big twist—a twist which I am going to spoil and then complain about, so if you think you want to read the novel and want to keep an open mind, maybe go away and come back later if you want.

If you’re still reading, here’s the twist. About half way through the novel, Hanne dies. “But you said she’s the first-person narrator!” I imagine you exclaiming; “How can she keep narrating if she’s dead?” That’s it, exactly. She does keep narrating after her death: for the second half of the novel, she is an observer from the other side, except that she’s not really somewhere else, she is present (but she’s not present), she is in and of the actual world (but she’s dead). Nobody can see or hear or feel her (there are some sort of exceptions to this): she is non-corporeal, which is a crucial point because at one point she inhabits someone else’s body (remember Ghost? yes, exactly like this, and for exactly the same purpose). But. She also walks and sleeps and trips over things and falls down. She experiences rain and cold and heat (but she has no body). I could go on, but my point is really a simple one: it all makes no sense at all, if you take even a minute to think about it.

I don’t mind a twist or a ghost or even illogic, if I can tell what its purpose is. (Also, for the record, I really enjoyed Ghost, even though it too makes no sense.) I just couldn’t understand at all why this novel, this story, needed Hanne to be dead. The best explanation is offered by Hanne herself (and echoed in most of the rave reviews quoted on the cover): it’s a novel about how love is stronger than death. At the risk of sounding hard-hearted (and you know I’m a Victorianist, so that can’t be true—I mean, I even cry when Dora dies in David Copperfield and I abhor Dora), that’s trite and uninteresting, and it’s also not true. It’s true that love survives death in the living. But any claim about love keeping the dead alive in the kind of literal way that Hanne continues in the world is just magical thinking, or wishful thinking. If the novel means (as my epigraph suggests) to offer a rebuke to narrow religious ideas about the afterlife with some kind of spiritual idealism, it’s done (for me, anyway) in a pretty unconvincing and irritating way. The one other idea I had is that Kent was playing with the trope of the tragic queer romance—but killing off (as she eventually does) not just one but both of her lovers hardly seems subversive.

Kent can write so beautifully! But Devotion devolved for me into nonsense—heartfelt, even poetic, nonsense, but nonsense. I was so disappointed.

If you read it and can help me understand it in a more sympathetic way on its own terms, I’d be genuinely interested.

Recent Reading: Diaz, Mason, Piñeiro

August 12, 2023August 12, 2023Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

My recent reading has included one book that is suspicious of story but clever (perhaps too clever) about plot and (for my taste anyway) shallowly dismissive about the possibility of meaning; another that is very conventionally plotted and pretty compelling reading but didn’t yield much deeper meaning; and then one more that I think really effectively combines plot, story, and meaning.

Trust-Smaller If you’re a friend of mine on social media, it won’t surprise you that Hernan Diaz’s Trust is the first one. It is an inarguably ingenious novel, but I thought (and the other members of my book club agreed) that the payoff for its ingenuity in the second half wasn’t enough to make up for the extraordinary, if self-conscious, dullness of the first half. Even a novel that can only really light up on a second reading can (and, arguably, should) generate some excitement the first time through. For me, a case in point would be Atonement, which is a much more layered and complex novel on a reread but which is also exceptionally well written and engrossing to begin with—that’s one of the reasons its big ‘twist’ is so important. If you want to write a novel that is implicitly or explicitly about the power of fiction(s), shouldn’t it actually be powerful fiction? But Trust not only drags on (and on and on) but eventually fizzles out. I assume that it does so to prove its point that there isn’t really anything solid at the heart of the stories we tell—that authenticity and identity are both also fictions, the way money and narrative both are (this is one of the novel’s central conceits). OK, fine, but that’s not only an unsurprising (dare I say unoriginal?) idea but a kind of lazy one. What if narrative is precisely the way we explore and discover and create meaning? Meaning doesn’t have to be absolute to matter, either, and human stories of the kind Trust plays with do matter, even if they are bound together in some ways by artifice. The novel’s embrace of vacuity as a premise and theme left me shrugging, and (something we talked about quite a lot at our book club meeting) it also produced a novel in which even the most painful human experiences were fairly boring to read about, and that’s not just disappointing, it’s also disturbing. Plenty of critics found a lot to admire in Trust but it just wasn’t for me.

Mason-Soldier-Cover I picked up Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier because I’m writing up his latest novel, North Woods, for the TLS and it’s good enough that I wanted to read more by him. The Winter Soldier is quite unlike North Woods, mostly in ways that favor the newer novel—which suggests Mason is getting better at his craft! The Winter Soldier (2018) is a good old-fashioned historical novel. It is packed with concrete details that make the time and place of its action vivid in the way I want historical fiction to be vivid. It takes place mostly in a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains during WWI; its protagonist, Lucius Krzelewski, is a medical student rapidly converted to a doctor to serve the desperate needs of the Austro-Hungarian army. His time at the hospital is full of harrowing incidents; through them runs his growing interest in an illness that eludes physical diagnosis and treatment—what today we would call PTSD. There are chaotic battle scenes and idyllic interludes; there’s a love story as well. It’s good! It really immerses you in its world, and (unlike Trust!) makes you care about its characters. I ended it not really sure it was about anything more than that. Novels don’t need to be, of course, though the best ones are. Still, I liked it enough that I will probably also look up Mason’s other novels, starting with The Piano Tuner. North Woods is a lot smarter and more subtle, though. (I am not sure it’s entirely successful: in my review, I will say more about that, when I figure out how to!)

Betty-Boo-Smaller And then there’s Claudia Piñeiro’s Betty Boo, which I found a really satisfying combination of smart plotting, thoughtful storytelling, and ideas that matter. In some ways it is less ambitious than the other two novels: it is structured more or less conventionally as a crime novel, and there aren’t really any narrative tricks to it, unless you count the sections that are ostensibly written by the protagonist, Nurit Iscar, about its central murder case. Iscar is a crime novelist who has had a professional setback (a crushing review of her foray into romantic fiction) and is currently getting by as a ghost writer. A contact at a major newspaper asks her to write some articles about a murder from a less journalistic and more contemplative perspective; in aid of this mission, she moves into the gated community where the victim lived and died. She ends up collaborating with the reporters on the crime beat as they investigate the death and discover that it is a part of a larger and more sinister operation—about which, of course, I will not give you any details here! Betty Boo is an unusual book: it doesn’t read quite like a “genre” mystery, as it is at least as interested in Nurit’s life and especially her relationships, with her close women friends and her lovers, as it is in its crime story. Also, Betty Boo is about crime, reporting, and fiction as themes, though its attention to these issues is integrated into the storytelling so that it never really feels metafictional—unlike Trust, which is all gimmick and so no substance, Betty Boo seems committed to the value and possibility of substance, even as Piñeiro provokes us to think about the obstacles we face in achieving it, in writing or in life, especially now that the news as a vehicle for both information and storytelling has become so degraded. I appreciated how original Betty Boo felt, and how genuinely interesting it was: I haven’t read another writer who does quite what Piñeiro does, in it or, for that matter, in Elena Knows. Of the three novels I read recently, this is the one I’m most likely to recommend to others, and I’m definitely going to read more of Piñeiro’s fiction, probably starting with A Little Luck, when I can get my hands on it.

In Brief: Elizabeth Lowry, The Chosen

August 2, 2023Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

Lowry I’m running a bit behind on writing I need to get done sooner rather than later, but I don’t want to let Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen go unmentioned, so I thought I’d say at least little bit about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.

Briefly, then, I liked The Chosen but didn’t love it: it was not as absorbing or revelatory an experience as Tóibín’s The Master, which is my touchstone for books that undertake to convey authorship in this kind of intensely personal, mostly biographical way. (I think The Master is the only book in this genre that I have found as exceptional as its subject was or deserves.) It is a smaller book than Tóibín’s, in both scope and in spirit, and I think it is possible, even likely, that someone who really knows Hardy would find it a more resonant experience: in her author’s note, Lowry says that she has “quarried his fiction, poetry, verse dramas, personal notebooks, interviews, letters, manuscripts, and his self-authored biography”—and that “the cornerstone of The Chosen . . . are the ‘Poems of 1912-13.'” Of this material, I know only the fiction, and I only know two of his novels well (Tess and Jude), so other echoes will have been lost on me.*

There’s a way in which that’s appropriate to the Hardy Lowry depicts, who is pretty pessimistic about the lasting value of any of his labors (“Surprise!” says absolutely nobody who has read any Hardy at all). Looking around the house he laboriously designed and built for himself and his first wife Emma (whose death is the immediate occasion for The Chosen), he thinks

Hasn’t he only imagined living here? In spite of his plans and designs and refurbishments, he never gave his heart and soul to it. His real existence has always been elsewhere. And now that he’s had to become the exhumer of his own life, forced to dig up its chattels and heaps of rubbish, he finds that they’ve disintegrated in his hands. Just fragments are left.

He’s feeling sad because of Emma’s death, but also and even more because the notebooks and diary he discovers Emma has left behind tell a story of their marriage in which she is bitter and unhappy and scornful of his work (even though, as we learn through the diary and through flashbacks) initially she was his greatest supporter. “Does it happen to all husbands and wives, must we all end up as enemies to each other?” he mournfully wonders.

The novel is primarily an excavation of their past and a meditation on the pain of being unable to close or make up for the gap that opened between them. Because I don’t know much about Hardy’s life, I found it interesting finding out more about it, and I thought Lowry effectively conveyed the atmosphere of the gloomy house and its (often equally gloomy) surrounding landscape. I was interested too in the picture she gives us of Hardy the writer, especially his despair about ever capturing in words the ideas he has for his novels, and the frustrations he has about their reception that lead him to give up fiction for poetry. Emma, on the other hand, seemed more elusive, although that fits with the novel’s theme of the otherness of people we think we know well.

*A quick look around turned up this review by Amitava Banerjee, posted at the estimable Victorian Web, that confirms my intuition about this.

“Other Possibilities”: Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual

July 29, 2023Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

And all of a sudden with the last mug in her hand, a message comes through loud and clear from her psyche: this is an accident. There is no need for her life to have worked out like this at all. So many other possibilities . . . How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen . . . Surely the real thing has yet to come along.

Light Perpetual is a “what if?” novel, an intimate version of alternative history where the only variables are personal. In this case the “what if?” is “what if these five children had not been killed by a V-2 rocket in 1944?” What might their lives have been like if they had unfolded across the rest of the 20th century instead of being cut so violently short? “What has gone,” Spufford observes, after a harrowingly specific and vivid account of the bombing,

is not just the children’s present existence—Vernon not trudging home to the house with the flitch of bacon hanging in the kitchen, Ben not on his dad’s shoulders crossing the park, astonished by the watery November clouds, Alec not getting his promised ride to the Crystal Palace tomorrow, Jo and Valerie not making faces at each other over their dinner of cock-a-leekie soup. It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?

Those lost futures are what Light Perpetual chronicles, in sections titled both to tell us where we are now and to remind us that they didn’t really get there: “T+5: 1949”; “T+35: 1979”; etc. Spufford3

As with all such fictions, a lot depends on our accepting the initial premise. Thanks to my philosopher husband, I have learned enough about determinism over the years to know that Spufford is not being particularly rigorous: for any one of the alternative scenarios he mentions (“some altered single second of arc . . . a guidance failure . . . a hiccup in fuel deliveries”) to have spared the children’s lives, a lot else (perhaps literally everything else) would have had to be different also. But, for me anyway, that’s OK, not just because that’s not really a novelist’s problem but because I too have spent a lot of time, however irrationally or unphilosophically, laying an absence against an imagined future: that is exactly one of the ways most of us measure loss.

The premise or gimmick once initiated, the next question is what the writer does with it: how good is the storytelling, how well is it written, what is the pay-off, artistically or emotionally? On these grounds I was really impressed with Light Perpetual, though the first few pages of the novel initially made me a bit worried. They are very writerly, self-consciously so, and I wasn’t sure I would like a whole novel in that style; luckily, the whole novel is not in that style, and so the passages that are in that register felt striking, impressive, often moving, rather than tedious. I’m not sure I can give a single example that would show what I mean, because it’s the contrast between the more straightforward and fast-moving narrative parts and these more elevated ones that worked for me, but here’s a taste:

As the chorus comes around, Jo throws her head back, straightens the soft tube of her windpipe, and harmonises. Solo harmonies for two. Her voices soar, Marcus laughs out loud, and her brown-and-silver song winds away into the night, over the roofs of Bexford, past the scarlet light on the unmoving crane, past the grand houses of the Rise and the hipster coffee shops on the hill, over the burger joints and the takeaways, between the towers of the Park Estate and out over the treetops; voice and bassline and drum break chasing leaves and fried-chicken wrappers, echoing from the surfaces of brick and concrete on which love makes its always temporary claim; from which we constitute a home, we who life our voices and pass through, pass through.

Spufford2 Is it just me, or is there something there reminiscent of the third-person narrator in Bleak House, who also likes to rise above the landscape, giving an almost cinematic effect, and whose voice also rises in such moments into a visionary or prophetic tone? “Come, other future,” exclaims Spufford’s narrator; “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light”; “Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this!” exclaims Dickens’s. (I also heard a strong echo of Middlemarch in a passage about everyone finding themselves “the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble.”)

The other thing that worried me about the novel’s set-up is that a story of children’s lost futures could easily lead to idealization and sentimentality: instead of killing Hitler, the alt-historical fantasy of Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, maybe Spufford would save the doctor who finds a cure for cancer or a radical leader who ends poverty or something. But Spufford’s five protagonists are flawed, ordinary, and often unsuccessful; the lives the novel imagines they might have lived are, like most lives, often hard, sometimes happy, occasionally beautiful. They do harm, or are complicit in it (one of them serves time in prison for her role in an act of horrific violence, for example, while another cheats someone out of all of their money); their ambitions are thwarted; their relationships often falter or fail altogether. In other words, the “might-be’s, could-be’s” are realistic, not idealistic; it is even possible at points to wonder if in some cases the future was not a loss worth grieving after all. atkinson1

Spufford could have told his five life stories without the framing device of the bomb: once they get underway, they are, on their own terms, effective devices for chronicling the upheavals and challenges of life in London over many eventful decades. Politics, labour activism, changing demographics and communities, technological changes, music and theater and sports and education: the novel engages us with all of these facets of modern life. As I read, I was interested enough in every character’s story that I often forget that I wasn’t following their “real” life. When I reached the last chapter (t + ∞), I found myself wondering what would really have been lost from the novel if Spufford hard written it straight—a question I also had about Atkinson’s A God in Ruins. I wasn’t annoyed with Spufford the way I was with Atkinson: at least he is clear from the outset about his game, for one thing, whereas Atkinson’s airy “Pouf” still irks me, all these years later! But in both cases I sense some distrust of “old-fashioned” novels, a desire to highlight and even excuse the artifice of fiction by layering an apology for it into the novel itself. I thought A God in Ruins was (would have been) a good enough novel, even a better novel, without the twist. I’m not so sure the same is true of Light Perpetual: its final words—”Come, dust”—have the power they do because we have committed for so long to other possibilities.