I have read some books since Fayne, honest I have! I just haven’t had the bandwidth, as the saying goes, to write them up properly—which is a shame, as some of them have been very good. So here’s a catch-up post, to be sure I don’t let them slip by entirely unremarked.
The best of them was undoubtedly Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard, which I was inspired to read by listening to Trevor and Paul talk about it on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast. It is a slim little book with a simple little story, but it contains vast depths of insight and feeling, and even some touches of humor, as it follows Henry Preston Standish overboard into the Pacific Ocean and then through the many hours he spends floating and treading water and hoping not to drown before the ship he had been traveling on comes back to pick him up. We also get to see how the folks on board react when he’s discovered to be missing, and we follow his thoughts and memories, learning more about him and how he came to be where he is—not in the ocean, which is easily and bathetically explained (he slips on a spot of grease at just the wrong moment when he’s in just the wrong place), but sailing from Honolulu to Panama in the first place.
I just loved this novel, which struck me as elegantly balanced between Standish’s individual experience, written with a pitch-perfect blend of comedy and pathos, and parable-like reflections on life and death more generally. Three small samples, just as teasers, from different moments in the book—one from before Standish’s slip and fall, one from his time in the water, and the other from the perspective of one of his shipboard companions:
The whole world was so quiet that Standish felt mystified. The lone ship plowing through the broad sea, the myriad of stars fading out of the wide heavens—these were all elemental things that soothed and troubled Standish. It was as if he were learning for the first time that all the vexatious problems of his life were meaningless and unimportant; and yet he felt ashamed at having had them in the same world that could create such a scene as this.
Not dead yet, Standish thought. And not alive either; before walking away and leaving his inert remains to shift for themselves it would be best to think of life as he had lived it; not of the ordinary events . . . but of the extraordinary things that had happened in his insufficient thirty-five years. And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.
He went down to his favorite spot on the well deck and gazed out at the sea and the materializing stars in the heaven. It defied his imagination. You could not think of this vastness one moment and then the next moment think of a puny bundle of humanity lost in its midst. One was so much bigger than the other; the human mind simply could not cope with the two together.
I also really appreciated Molly Peacock’s A Friend Sails in on a Poem, which is an account of her long personal and working friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin. It is a blend of memoir and craft book, which might not work for every reader, but I found the insider perspective on how poems are created and shaped fascinating and illuminating. Peacock includes some of the poems that she talks about; this was my favorite:
The Flaw
The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turning blue field into sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.
Peacock talks often in the book about her interest in poetic form; I liked this explanation of its value:
Form does something else vigorously physical: it compresses. Because you have to meet a limit—a line length, a number of syllables, a rhyme—you have to stretch or curl a thought to meet that requirement. Curiously, as the lyrical mind works to answer that demand, the unconscious is freed to experience its most playful and most dangerous feelings. Form is safety, the safe place in which we can be most volatile.
A Friend Sails in on a Poem is not an effusive book, but there’s something uplifting about its record of a friendship between women that is shaped by shared artistic and intellectual interests and not threatened by the differences between them as people and as writers. There’s no melodrama, not even really any narrative tension, around their friendship; the book’s momentum comes solely and, I thought, admirably simply from the movement of the two poets in tandem through time.
I was more ambivalent about Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. At times I found its fragmentary structure annoying in the way I often feel about books that read to me as unfinished, deliberately or not. But I also thought some of the rhetorical devices Smith uses to structure it were very effective, especially her reflections on the questions, usually well-meaning, people have asked her about the breakdown of her marriage, her divorce, and her writing about it: there are the answers she would like to give, typically raw, fraught, and conflicted, reflecting the complexity of her feelings and experiences, which defy straightforward replies; and then there are the answers she does give, neater, shorter, sanitized. That rang true to me, as it probably does to anyone who has been through something difficult and knows that when people ask how you are doing, they are not really, or are only rarely, asking for the real answer.
Smith’s story also felt very specific, very particular to me. She remarks in a few instances that she is writing it because perhaps it will become something other people can use, but her care not to extrapolate or generalize, while I suppose appropriate to such a personal kind of memoir, seemed to me to work against that possibility. Others might well disagree, and I can see making the argument that the portable value of her book lies precisely in its modeling of how to be honest and vulnerable about something so intimate. In the spirit of her viral poem “Good Bones,” You Could Make This Place Beautiful (a title which itself comes from that poem), Smith’s book is, ultimately, about repair, about how even a situation that seems like a hopeless ruin can, with some time and a lot of effort, become habitable again:
Something about being at the ocean always reminds me of how small I am, but not in a way that makes me feel insignificant. It’s a smallness that makes me feel a part of the world, not separate from it. I sat down in a lounge chair and opened the magazine to my poem [“Bride”], the thin pages flapping in the wind. IN that moment, I felt like I was where I was meant to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.
Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.
Something had shifted, maybe just slightly, but perceptibly. I remember feeling the smile on my face the whole walk back to the hotel, hoping it didn’t seem odd to the people around me. I stopped at the drawbridge that lifted so the boats could go under. The whole street lifted up right in front of me. Nothing seemed impossible anymore. Everything was possible.
OK, maybe! The optimism is welcome, and maybe authentic, though (and again, others might disagree) it feels a bit forced to me here, whereas “Good Bones” has a quality of wistfulness to it that I like better.
Finally, I just finished Mick Herron’s London Rules, the third (or possibly fourth?) of his Slough House books that I’ve read. It was thoroughly entertaining, and I read it at a brisk pace as a result, but by the end it did strike me as a risk that the series’ signature elements, including Lamb’s flatulence and the various other Slow Horses’ quirks, could wear a bit thin.
I’m reading for work too, of course, most recently The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in Mystery & Detective Fiction and a cluster of works on ‘fallen women’ for my Victorian ‘Woman Question’ seminar—DGR’s “Jenny,” Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway,” and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh,” a story I love (I wrote about it here the last time I taught it in person, which seems a lifetime ago). As always, I am thinking about ways to shake up the reading list for the mystery class, if only to bring in at least one book more recent than the early 1990s, which used to seem very current but of course is not any longer. A student asked today, in the context of our discussion of the moral discomfort possibly created by the “cozy” subgenre, whether we were going to talk about true crime in the course. We aren’t, because no example of it is assigned and because the course is specifically about crime “fiction”, but one idea I’ve been kicking around is Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, which is a novelization of a true crime case. I haven’t read it yet, so that’s obviously what I need to do next, but I listened to a podcast episode with her talking about it and it was really fascinating.
I hope to get back to more regular blogging about books, and about my classes, an exercise in self-reflection that I’ve missed. It has been a very busy and often stressful couple of months, for personal reasons (about which, as I have said before, more eventually, perhaps), but whenever I do settle in to write here I am reminded of how good it feels, of how much I enjoy the both the freedom to say what I think and the process of figuring out what that is! My current reading (slowly, in the spirit of Kim and Rebecca’s #KateBriggs24 read-along, though I am not an official participant) is Kate Brigg’s The Long Form, which I am enjoying a lot; I’m experimenting with having more than one book on the go, as well, so now that I’ve finished London Rules I will go back to my tempting stack of library books and pick another to contrast with Briggs, perhaps Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Hotel Silence, since I liked Butterflies in November a lot. I hope to get through all the books in that stack before they come due—but I know I’m not the only reader who finds that their aspirations of this kind, and the pace of their library holds, can exceed their capacity!
To anyone familiar with the rigid strictures women faced in the 19th-century, some aspects of Fayne will be predictable, even with the device of an intersex character to subvert the binaries they were based on. Fayne succeeds because MacDonald is a fine storyteller who has more to say than “the times were unfair to women,” or maybe more accurately more she wants to do than just offer this critique (which is not to say it’s not an important critique, or that through the character of Charles / Charlotte she doesn’t extend it significantly). Everything about Fayne suggests that MacDonald wants to have fun as a novelist by writing an unabashedly melodramatic novel with her own variations on the kinds of twists and surprises we get in Gothic or sensation fiction: mistaken or secret identities, false confinements, drugs, sexual secrets, lost heirs, treachery and deceptions of all kinds—but also true-hearted friends and allies pointing the way towards solutions to these mysteries and towards a future in which the people we come to care for will be safe and happy. Overall, it works! It is fun, gripping, surprising, infuriating, and often touching. And, not incidentally, Charlotte herself is a fine addition to the list of 19th-century literary heroines who put up lively resistance to oppressive norms: Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, and Marion Halcombe, for starters. There are many moments in Fayne that are clearly nods to Charlotte’s rebellious predecessors.
Orbital does more, though, than indulge in this potentially saccharine vision of a perfect world spoiled, pointlessly, by human squabbles, greed, and violence. This is a common starting point, the novel proposes, including for the astronauts, initially overwhelmed by the invisibility of the borders and boundaries that motivate so much hostility and cause so much death:
The astronauts are also aware that their own astonishing vantage point is itself implicated in these forces; running through the novel is a debate, unsettled (perhaps impossible to settle), about the value of space exploration, about ideas of progress and the capacity of human invention to do as much harm as good. One of the astronauts, Chie, reflects on her own family history, including the accidents of circumstance that meant her grandfather and her mother survived the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. What story did her mother intend Chie to discern in the photograph she has given her labelled “Moon Landing Day”?
The last two months of 2023 have been so frantic (about which more, perhaps, some other time) that not only did I get very little reading done that wasn’t absolutely necessary for work, but the chaotic atmosphere drove almost all recollection of what I’d read or written earlier in the year clear out of my mind. It’s a good thing I keep records! Looking them over, it was nice to be reminded of what was actually a pretty good year for both reading and writing. I’ll run through the highlights (and also some lowlights) here, as has been my year-end ritual since I started Novel Readings in 2007.
When I was asked by Trevor and Paul at the wonderful Mookse & Gripes podcast to contribute to their “best of the year” round-up episode, the book that immediately came to mind for me was John Cotter’s memoir Losing Music. It deserved but didn’t get a blog post of its own, but you can read a bit about it 
A stretch of uninspiring reading early in the year was broken by Jessica Au’s 
Barbara Kingsolver’s 
I can’t say reading 
I wrote three reviews for the TLS in 2023, Toby Litt’s 
I wrote two other somewhat more academic pieces, though neither of them was, strictly speaking, a “research” publication. One was a review for Women’s Studies of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby’s correspondence in an excellent new edition by Elaine and English Showalter; the other was an essay for a forum organized by my friend and (nearby) colleague Tom Ue on ‘teaching the Victorians’ today, which is coming out eventually in the Victorian Review. I have written literally thousands of words about how I teach the Victorians today: this was a task for which almost two decades of blogging was exactly the right preparation!
That’s the book I expected The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith to be: Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith’s life story, with Mary Ellen herself placed, rightly, at its center. And that is what we get, sort of, in part. Usually what is known about Mary Ellen is what the figure Johnson calls “the Biographer” has said about her in passing, while telling the story of her famous second husband. “But of course,” as Johnson says,
And yet, Johnson considers, or imagines Mary Ellen’s contemporaries considering, her upbringing may have taught her to want things and to behave in ways incompatible with ordinary expectations for nice young ladies of the time. Johnson gives a brisk and basically sound overview of 19th-century gender roles and conventions, familiar to anyone who has read around in or about the history and literature of the period; she also rightly notes that the “ideal” woman (“innocent, unlearned, motherly”) was always a fiction, “encountered more often in the breach than in the observance,” although her image exerted powerful influence over how real women’s behavior was judged, as Mary Ellen’s history (meaning not her life, but the way that life would be told) was to show. Peacock’s good intentions may, ironically, have set Mary Ellen up for failure: “perhaps Mary Ellen Peacock would have been better off if she had not been so clever and educated.”
There is a lot about how things then unfolded that Johnson (like her antagonist “the Biographer”) can’t know for sure. The crucial undisputed fact is that Mary Ellen left Meredith, “eloping” with their mutual friend, the artist—and later 
The surprising thing about The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, for me, was how much else it does besides reconstitute Mary Ellen’s biography. One fascinating aspect is Johnson’s self-consciousness about her own methodology, something that becomes explicit through her extensive notes. These turn out to be only incidentally about citing sources. A lot of them amplify or illustrate parts of the main text (for example, in the notes you will find many of the recipes associated with the cookery books by Mary Ellen or her daughter by her first marriage, Edith Nicolls). But others take on complex questions about how to do the work Johnson has undertaken, and particularly about how to understand the relationship between conventional biographical sources and information and the insights that are offered by an author’s writings, specifically in this case by Meredith’s novels. This is, as Johnson is clearly aware, a vexed issue: she raises the specter of what critics call the “biographical fallacy,” which can lead to “facile connections” between the life and the art, but also of the biographical tendency to chronicle the work “without imagining that there was much connection between that work and the writer’s ongoing life experiences.” She advocates what she calls, citing Frederick Crews, “a sense of historical dynamics,” recognizing that though a one-to-one correspondence is an implausible assumption, still there inevitably relationships between writers’ lives and what they write.
I actually found more powerful, though (perhaps, again, because this particular polemic has lost some of its urgency, though certainly not all of it), the sections of The True History that remind us that, from the right perspective, all lives are lesser. At these times Johnson’s book is less a literary history or biography and more a quirky form of momento mori, its attention to the leveling effects of death and time serving to puncture even the most inflated vanity even as it offers (perhaps) some philosophical consolation. “Whether Felix grew up to be like his Mama, or his Grandpapa, or his Papa,” she observes, in a passage characteristic of the book’s engaging yet disorienting blend of briskness and gravitas,
I recommended this book for my book club as a “feminist palate cleanser” after Money. (I was also inspired by 
Money, money, money,
But it matters (to me, at least) what those sentences are about, and also what they are for, and for me and most of the others in my book club, this was really the sticking point. What is it exactly that we are being invited to participate in when we read this novel? How far does “it’s for comic effect” excuse offering up the things Self says and does for our (presumed) entertainment? What kind of implied author (to let Amis himself temporarily off the hook) thinks that we will laugh, not just at how stupid Self is at the opera but at his attempts at rape? that we will be engaged and rewarded by a monologue that (however energetic and rhetorically ingenious) is relentlessly sexist and racist and bigoted? Again, we get it: John Self is an anti-hero, mercilessly exposed in all his vices; the novel is satirical, Rabelaisian, Swiftian, pick your poison. It is poisonous stuff, though, and—to bring Amis back into it—there’s such a sense of gleeful bad boy “look at me” about the whole thing, with all the metafictional cleverness deployed as back-up in case the whole “I’m only joking” excuse isn’t enough. That it is such a popular book among (as far we could tell, only) male readers is disconcerting: it’s as if an uncomfortable number of them enjoy a chance to vicariously indulge the kinds of demeaning, exploitative, offensive attitudes (towards women especially) that they know better than to express in propria persona. As we discussed, we have all had the tediously unpleasant experience, at one point of another, of calling out sexism in conversation with men we know, or in TV or movies we are watching with them, only to be dismissed or shut down or worse—often, again, with “it’s only a joke.” The feminist kill-joy is a role we’d rather not have to play, but the alternative is to shut up and take it. Between us, too, we’ve had enough of the other kinds of bad experiences John Self inflicts on the women in his life not to find his shamelessness about them entertaining. We don’t need any lessons in how bad this kind of s–t is, after all, so what social or moral or other revelation can possibly come our way from approaching them by way of John Self?
Our discussion wasn’t all negative. One member of the group noted that she felt John Self was a genuinely memorable, even iconic character, and we all grudgingly agreed that, hate him though we did, he was brilliantly executed: his voice (which is what Amis identified as the most important aspect of the novel, and fair enough) is distinctive and unforgettable. That we would like to forget it could, I suppose, be considered our problem, not the novel’s! Money also prompted a lot of discussion about the more general question of how far a novelist can or should go with an offensive character; we also considered why or whether Self is really so much worse than, say, the soulless ensemble of characters in Succession. We thought that Money would not have worked at all from the outside: what interest we took in Self, and any glimmering of sympathy we had for him, was entirely a product of our immersion in his point of view, which in turn became a test for us of Amis’s experiment, of how far he could go without losing us. We did all read to the end (though we mostly admitted having done some strategic skimming when it just got to be too much)—and our conversation was definitely lively. I don’t expect any of us will read anything else by Amis, though. (Years ago, I remembered, we read his father’s Ending Up, which we enjoyed thoroughly.)
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:
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:
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:
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:
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 
Novel Readings 