Mary Lawson

She threw out a bottle of perfume the twins had given her for Christmas one year, the name of which - Ambush - had made her father laugh out loud ...

A new novel by Mary Lawson is always a pleasure. Like Anne Tyler she writes about families out of step with each other and her literary landscape is always Northern Ontario in Canada. I’m re-reading Mary Lawson’s three earlier novels before I start A Town Called Solace.

My favourite Road Ends was published in 2015 and its snowy setting is the fictional town of Struan.  The novel has a warm beating heart, largely in the form of Megan the eldest daughter of a mother who can’t stop having babies and then losing interest in them when they become children.  The eldest brother Tom is struggling to cope with the suicide of his friend and instead of using his degree he opts to drive the town snowplough.  Some of the most vibrant scenes in the novel are Tom struggling to get the ancient ‘headache yellow’ snowplough to start and then rumbling down the roads of Struan with ‘the new snow flying off the blade of the plough in a great soft arc.’

Megan has the household pretty much buttoned down, cooking, cleaning, laundry, organising her mother, keeping her younger brothers under control and loving and caring for her smallest brother Adam. It is when she decides to leave for London that this outwardly respectable but deeply troubled family start to fall apart. The dopey mother and wilfully blind father can’t seem address the benign neglect of little Adam but as Lawson weaves their narratives together you begin to understand the reasons for their behaviour.

Lawson is wonderful on the London of the late 1960s and 21 year old Megan’s experiences as an outsider in the world of Mick Jagger, bedsits, mini skirts, Carnaby Street and sexual freedom. I am looking forward to starting A Town Called Solace.

Anyone else vaguely remember a perfume by Dana called Ambush? 

The Female Persuasion

I loved Meg Wolitzer's last novel The Interestings.  Particularly the summer camp for gifted teenagers Spirit-in-the-woods and her evocation of the 1970s.  Her latest novel The Female Persuasion has just been published in paperback.  The reviews described it as a feminist or #MeToo novel and I wasn't sure if it was for me as I'm not keen on novels which are heavily based on issues. It's probably why I like Anne Tyler so much as her focus is usually on families who are out of step with each other and the passing of time.

I needn't have worried though, because The Female Persuasion is a big sweeping story with love, tragedy, ambition and compromise.  It starts off as a bit of a campus novel - I love a campus novel!  The central character Greer is bright and likeable but lacks confidence.  An introspective teen who was saved by books as a child.  After an unpleasant incident at a fresher party and a visit to her campus by a renowned and charismatic feminist Greer finds her focus and a heroine.

The feminist Faith Frank is an interesting character.  Active during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s she is now slightly out of step with social media and herself the target of snide internet comments.  Still glamorous and active in the movement she has had to learn to compromise.  I kept thinking she must be based on Gloria Steinem but it is never stated.

Everyone grows and changes in this novel - Greer's adorable boyfriend Cory and her best friend Zee and Greer herself learns that sometimes your heroines have feet of clay.

An immersive and enjoyable read.

A Patchwork Planet

There were eleven full-time employees at Rent-a-Back. That meant nine people that I knew of had New Year’s plans. And these were not particularly successful people. Several might be looked upon as losers.

Anne Tyler’s charming novel A Patchwork Planet begins with a package delivered on a train to Philadelphia the day before New Year’s Eve and ends pretty much the same way. Barnaby Gaitlin is probably Tyler’s most attractive underachiever. His teenage penchant for breaking into neighbourhood houses to steal tiny mementos and rifling through photo albums results in a spell in a reform school for rich boys. Now almost thirty, he refuses to join the family firm and works for Rent-a-Back shifting furniture and doing odd jobs for the elderly and housebound.

Pretty much impervious to criticism from his ex-wife and appalling mother for not finishing his degree, living in a rented apartment, dressing like a tramp and working in a job without prospects Barnaby has an empathy which has the reader rooting for him from the start. When he goes to watch his daughter Opal’s ballet recital he feels for her ungainliness:
 
When they all set their heels together and pointed their toes sideways, she was the only one with no space showing between her thighs.

When he unpacks the Christmas decorations belonging to an old lady consisting of faded paper chains and a bent home-made aluminium star with no matching points he is overwhelmed with sadness and remembers why some of his workmates can’t stay in the job.

There is much comic relief though particularly in the dialogue between Barnaby and Martine, his Rentaback sidekick, who despite her petite stature, talks tough and drives the truck and the farcical plot involving a substantial sum of money hidden and retrieved in a flour bin more than once.  There is also one of Tyler's notorious family mealtimes at Thanksgiving where Barnaby's mother - a woman with something 'glittery and overwrought' about her excels herself in unpleasantness.  

 

This is a lovely seasonal read. What is your favourite Anne Tyler novel?

Ladder of Years

Yeah, so I abandoned Alice Hoffman's The Rules of Magic after reading a few chapters and realising I have absolutely no interest in witches and magic.  Nothing wrong with the book, just didn't speak to me.  My cat took a fancy to it though.

Turned with relief to Anne Tyler and re-read Ladder of Years the story of Cordelia who abandons her family on a Delaware beach.  Almost without intending to and thinking she can turn back any moment she walks away, keeps walking, hitches a ride to another town and starts a new life.  Mourning the recent loss of her father, married to an undemonstrative family doctor, bossed around by two older sisters and mother of typically indifferent teenagers, Delia is not so much ignored as overlooked.  When her extended family take their annual holiday her children set up their beach mats a good twenty feet from the adults and she exchanges the kind of petty digs with her husband familiar to all in long-term relationships.

Her entire marriage unrolled itself before her: ancient hurts and humiliations theoretically forgotten but just waiting to be revived at moments like these.

Of course, what she's really doing is leaving her family before they leave her.  The 'empty nest' sadness that can affect women in later life is rarely explored in fiction and Anne Tyler nails it as always.  When Delia finds a job and a lonely rented room she is haunted by dreams of her children when they were young and wakes to find her face wet with tears.

Occasionally some jolt to the senses - a whiff of coconut oil, the grit of sand in her swimsuit seams - bought to mind the old family beach trips.... that packing up moment toward sunset each day when children beg to stay a little bit longer ... she remembered the bickering, and the sting of carelessly kicked-up sand against burned skin, and the weighty soft-boned weariness. She recalled each less-than-perfect detail, and yet still she would have given anything to find herself in one of those moments...

It's not all sad, there is skewed humour and a brilliant ending.  Ladder of Years is Anne Tyler's thirteenth novel and I think, her most perfectly representative work. 

Abandoned any books lately? 

Re-reading A Spool of Blue Thread

So one day we were at Topps Home and Garden because Abby wanted a kitchen fire extinguisher, and while the man was ringing it up she said, ‘Do you mind hurrying? It’s kind of an emergency.’ Just being silly, you know, she meant it as a joke. Well he didn’t get it. He said, ‘I have to follow procedures, ma’am,’ and she and I just doubled up laughing. We were crying with laughter.’ A Spool of Blue Thread Anne Tyler 2015

Literary prizes may come and go but there is no novelist quite like Anne Tyler for comfort, sustenance and the sheer pleasure of good writing. Her novels are all firmly rooted in her home town of Baltimore and feature a cast of underachievers, misfits, delinquents, women past their prime and men whose ambitions have been thwarted. Tyler rarely intervenes in the narrative to judge or comment on the actions of her characters she just lets the story unfold and the characters find their own solutions or compromises.

Denny from A Spool of Blue Thread is one of Tyler’s notorious misfits. Handsome, elusive, virtually unemployable and touchy as hell he is not as lovable as Barnaby from A Patchwork Planet or as wayward as Lindy from The Amateur Marriage, but the kind of person given to snooping into the diaries and personal papers of his family yet can’t bear any scrutiny of his own life. As his father Red says, 'One question too far and he is out the door.’ 

A Spool of Blue Thread is a novel about a family out of step with each other and it’s a brilliant return to form after the Beginner’s Goodbye. Tyler’s gift for comedy sparkles and the telephone rant which Abby’s assertive daughter delivers to brother Denny extends over two pages and is a joy to read. But it is Abby, the family matriarch who is the warm beating heart of the novel. A woman who prides herself on her phenomenal memory which makes what happens to her later in the novel all the more poignant.

 

This article from The Guardian is a fascinating insight into how Tyler and other Man Booker short-listed writers created their novels.
 

Happy New Year! 

More Tyler

The time Pauline got lost in her own alley and the time she confused the brake with the accelerator and the time she backed into a pedestrian, knocked him down, stuck her head out of the window, called, "I'm sorry!" and pulled forward, put her car in reverse, backed up and knocked him down again. The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler's last novel The Beginner's Goodbye is now out in paperback.  I bought it in Sainsbury's for the princely sum of £3.49.  Rather nice to put a great contemporary novel into your basket alongside your milk, bread and yoghurts!

That's the thing about Anne Tyler.  She is a writer who is both complex and yet popular enough to be stocked in your local supermarket.  I've just read The Amateur Marriage which I think is one of her finest novels.  It's the story of Pauline and Michael, a couple who should never have married.  There is no domestic violence, adultery or debt - the kind of things that often tear couples apart - but their marriage is toxic nonetheless and the novel examines the relentless grind of being married to an unsuitable partner.

Michael is thrifty, cautious and calm.  Pauline is emotional, impulsive and sensitive.  Like Maggie in Breathing Lessons and Muriel in The Accidental Tourist she can be infuriating but I found her a far more likeable character than cold fish Michael.

The novel spans several decades beginning in Baltimore's Polish community where Michael grows up, becomes engaged to Pauline and enlists.  After being injured in the army they marry and raise a family.  Their marriage is put under further strain by the disappearance of their wayward daughter.  The implication is that she has joined the 1960's Haight-Ashbury 'summer of love' community and developed a serious drug problem.  This theme of the novel reminded me a little of Unless by Carole Shields.

Eventually Michael leaves Pauline and finds (rather too quickly I thought) the kind of cool, self-contained woman who suits his character.  The final chapter comes as a surprise and I'm still thinking about it, but there are hints that Michael still yearns for Pauline.  Vintage Tyler.

Nordic Noir

I've been reading Norway's 'Queen of Crime' Karin Fossum while the snow falls outside.  She writes psychological crime fiction and her novels feature Inspector Konrad Sejer a grey-haired senior detective with a kind heart and steely determination.  In Don't Look Back Sejer investigates the death of a young woman whose body is found by a Norwegian lake. She is lying so peacefully with her face close to the edge of the water she could almost be asleep and someone has thrown a coat over her body as if to keep her warm.  I liked the close-knit small village atmosphere and the descriptions of the Nordic pines surrounding the lake.  Occasionally a sentence or word jars a little and I suspect that something has been lost in the translation but this is an exciting read with an unsettling twist on the final page.

I then read Bad Intentions about the apparent suicide of a teenager.  Sejer is unconvinced by the statements of his friends and when an artist painting at Glitter Lake inadvertently discovers the body of another teenager events begin to fall into place.  Call Me is also about a teenager with a fondness for macabre practical jokes and a pet guinea pig named Bleeding Heart!

I have to say that I raced through these books but after spending so much time in the company of thieves, liars, perverts and murderers I began to think about an interview I read with Anne Tyler in The Guardian where she was quoted as saying 'there aren't enough quiet, gentle, basically good people in a novel.'  I'm enjoying my foray into Scandi-crime, but I'm not sure it is a genre I could read exclusively.

Maine

Courtney Sullivan's fabulous novel evokes the pine-scented, sea-salted air of Maine as four generations of the Irish-American Kelleher family spend every summer in the beach house originally won in a fifty-dollar bet.

The story has a female focus and shifts in perspective from Alice the matriarch, her bitter daughter Kathleen, 'perfect' daughter-in-law Anne Marie and adorable grand-daughter, 32-year old Maggie who is pregnant by her bad boy boyfriend, Gabe and determined to keep the baby and maintain her writing career.  There are wonderful descriptions of Brooklyn where Maggie lives with its 'streets of perfect brownstones' and 'the Sunday Farmer's market where she and Gabe had so often gone in early autumn to buy fresh vegetables and apple crisp and dahlias for the fire escape.'

As with all families there are tensions and bitterness and old scores to settle but Sullivan skillfully brings all the stories together at the beach house in Maine.  This book was heavily marketed as a beach read during the summer but I think it somehow suits the autumn season better.

Now that I'm back in this century I'm reading and very much enjoying Anne Tyler's first novel If Morning Ever Comes, I've got Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty on order and according to Barbara Kingsolver's website there is a new novel out in November.  Spoilt for choice! 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

At the Oxford Literary Festival last month Anne Tyler was asked which of her own novels she prefers. She said that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is her favourite because of all her novels it most closely represents what she intended when she started it.  She also said that she was particularly fond of the character Ezra, and hinted that he may have re-surfaced in a disguised format in some of her other novels.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant begins with the dying Pearl reflecting back over her life, her courtship and marriage, her three children and her strength in raising them alone when her husband leaves the family home.  Pearl is a tough woman.  When the children were young she was not averse to violence and verbal abuse, but she bought home the bacon and the children survived and flourished.

Well not flourished exactly.  Cody, insanely jealous of Ezra since childhood, steals his girlfriend, marries her and wildly speculates that his son may be Ezra's.  Cody is the kind of person who not only has to win at Monopoly but is not happy unless everyone else is thousands of pounds in debt. Jenny trains as a doctor and after an unfortunate first marriage produces a large extended family.  Ezra takes over a local restaurant which he names The Homesick Restaurant and his dishes are somewhat experimental.  While Cody and Jenny have a fractious relationship with their mother, Ezra is genuinely sweet-natured and gets on with everybody
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The recurring motif of the novel is Ezra attempting to get the whole family to eat together in The Homesick Restaurant without somebody bursting into tears or storming out.  You will have to read it to discover whether he ever manages it.  A fabulous novel, but oh so sad.

The Beginner's Goodbye

Shoulda read a few reviews before purchasing Marilynne Robinson's When I Was a Child I Read Books. I thought it would be a novel like the wonderful Gilead but it was a collection of essays and unfortunately they didn't speak to me. If anyone would like my copy do let me know ... I ought to do a giveaway!

I've always hoped to find a pristine copy of Rumer Godden's Black Narcissus in a second-hand book store instead of numerous copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but I need search no more. Virago Modern Classics have acquired fifteen Rumer Godden titles including Black Narcissus . I am so pleased about this. The Greengage Summer is my favourite coming-of-age novel and Rumer Godden is long overdue for a popular revival.

Very much enjoyed Anne Tyler's latest novel The Beginner's Goodbye but I don't think it is quite on a par with her great novels Breathing Lessons or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Aaron Woolcott's wife is killed when an oak tree smashes into their house while she is sitting out on the sunporch. While he is struggling to cope with the grief and loss his wife revists him, suddenly reappearing when he is shopping for vegetables or falling into step beside him as he strolls along the pavement. Whenever she appears she looks wistful or unhappy.

If you've read The Accidental Tourist you will remember that Macon writes travel books for people who don't like to travel. Tyler has some fun with a similar theme in this novel. Aaron works as an editor for his family publishing house which produces Beginner's Guides and 'vanity' titles. The office camaraderie and chitchat about the titles they publish is highly amusing.

You may have noticed some word links on my blog to very tacky ads. I didn't put them there - I've never wanted to monetise - and I think it is some kind of malware that I've reported to Blogger. Has anyone else had this problem?

Anne Tyler in Oxford

Chloe and Imogen at Christ Church

Just floated back down to earth after attending the literary event of the year - if not the decade - last Sunday. Anne Tyler's interview at the Sheldonian Theatre in beautiful Oxford.

The theatre was packed and the audience was quite jittery . Knowing that Tyler is notoriously reticent to be interviewed I think we were nervous on her behalf. In fact she was extremely composed and serene. The audience was apparently full of writers (although I didn't recognise anybody!) and she spoke a lot about the writing life, how she is happiest when writing, how she drafts and redrafts continuously and how she loves to be in the middle of writing a novel.

The audience were invited to ask questions and as a reader rather than a writer I was most interested in the question about what she likes to read. She said that she reads a lot of contemporary novels particularly first novels and that she came to Jane Austen late, reading Pride and Prejudice in her thirties when she was in bed with flu. She was warm and funny and throughout this week I've recalled different things she said. A podcast is available on The Sunday Times website but it is not free, unfortunately.

After the interview I bought a copy of the new book The Beginners Goodbye but the queue for signing stretched right around the theatre so I decided not to wait because I wanted to join my daughter Chloe and her friend Imogen to wander around Oxford, look at beautiful Christ Church college, browse Blackwell's enormous book store and visit the ice cream cafe in St Aldates. A very enjoyable day.

More Anne Tyler

I always thought I would save literary festivals for when I retire but when I read that Anne Tyler will be attending the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival at Christchurch in April to receive an Outstanding Literary Achievement prize I couldn't resist ordering a ticket. If anyone else is planning to visit the festival do let me know and maybe we can meet for a latte!

Breathing Lessons is probably my favourite Tyler because of lovely Ira who is married to the infuriating Maggie. From the opening chapter where Maggie pulls out into the path of a Pepsi truck to the near-farcical scene at the races where Ira's obsessive sister lines up marshmallows along the seats of the bleachers, Breathing Lessons is a perfectly pitched comic novel and like the best comic novels it is sad, too. Tyler never intervenes to judge or comment on the actions of her characters she just lets the story unfold and the characters find their own solutions or compromises.

I also liked Noah's Compass. At the age of 60, Liam Pennywell is made redundant from his job as a high school lecturer. He moves to a smaller flat in a less desirable area of town and while asleep in bed is attacked and robbed. Waking in hospital he is infuriated that he remembers nothing of the crime or his assailant. He then meets and falls in love with a younger woman who works as a 'professional rememberer' for an elderly wealthy business man, remembering names and events on his behalf. What I particularly enjoyed about this novel was the character of his younger daughter, Kitty, who drifts in and out of his flat wearing a mirror 'the size of a dime' in her pierced naval and talking into a mobile phone so tiny he 'wonders how it can stretch between mouth and ear.'

I finished Back When We Were Grownups last night and now I really will make a start on Olive Kitteridge ...

Elizabeth Strout

Oh Elizabeth Strout is a good writer. I bought Amy and Isabelle after reading an on-line interview with Anne Tyler who said that she admired it.

Fifteen-year old Amy and her mother live at Oyster Point, the posh end of Shirley Falls, Maine. Single mother Isabelle doesn't have the confidence or means to mix with the well-heeled wives of the neighbourhood. Lonely Amy embarks on a relationship with her charismatic maths teacher who seduces her by quoting the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay. Meanwhile the soapy, sudsy river which divides Shirley Falls churns around the mill where Isabelle works as a secretary and the women in the office bicker and gossip.

There are many wonderful moments in this novel - Isabelle and Amy sharing doughnuts in the steamy coffee shop and Amy's fleeting moment of happiness, Isabelle trying to improve her mind by reading Madame Bovary which the women in the mill nickname 'Madame Ovary', kind Fat Bev's battles with her digestion and the way the river reflects the events of the novel. There is also the recurring motif of a missing 12-year-old girl which turns the novel almost into a thriller at the end.

Strout is an earthier writer than Tyler (her characters say f**k!) but has the same gift for dialogue and humour. I've ordered her novel Abide With Me and Olive Kitteridge a collection of short stories, both set in Maine. Do let me know if you've read Elizabeth Strout, I'm sure I've seen reviews of Olive Kitteridge around the blogosphere but can't remember where. I'd like to re-read them.

Digging to America

I've been buying books as Christmas presents using my usual 'one for you, two for me' method. Sticking to paperbacks though, hardbacks are just too expensive. All the Charlotte Bronte news yesterday made me want to re-read Jane Eyre when I've worked through my Anne Tyler phase. Very much enjoyed Digging to America. Look, I've even written a review!

Baltimore airport. Two Korean babies arrive in America to be met by their adoptive parents. A large welcoming party are gathered to greet Jin-Ho. Brad and Bitsy, her all-American adoptive parents and their friends and relatives hold balloons and pink ribbons and video record the arrival. Sooki has a much more low-key welcome from Sami and Ziba, the young couple who are adopting her and their mother, an Iranian immigrant, Maryam, who resents the way that Americans expect her to think and behave.

The two families decide to keep in touch so that the girls will grow up as friends. Each year on the anniversary of their arrival in America an Arrival Party is held to celebrate the event and the video is replayed. Brad and Bitsy raise Jin-Ho to retain her Korean identity - to the extent of occasionally dressing her in full Korean costume complete with headdress - and naturally Jin-Ho eventually rebels, wanting to be called Jo and coming to hate the Arrival parties.

I've always admired the way that Amy Tan writes about Asian-American culture clashes and Tyler writes with the same sensitivity and humour. I particularly enjoyed the chapter in which Hurricane Isabel hits the neighbourhood.

Jin-Ho began to feel prickly-skinned and excited, the way she did on Christmas Eve. During supper she kept twisting around in her chair to look out the kitchen window. The air was a weird shade of lavender and the trees were flipping their leaves wrong side to. "Keep your fingers crossed for our elms," her father told her. "As much money as I've spent on those things, I might as well be putting them through college." Digging to America, Anne Tyler

The Accidental Tourist

'Macon sat next to her with a magazine he'd found rolled up in one of her pockets. He saw that The Police were experiencing personality conflicts. That David Bowie worried about mental illness, that Billy Idol's black shirt appeared to have been ripped halfway off his body. Evidently these people led very difficult lives. He had no idea who they were.' The Accidental Tourist,
Anne Tyler

Some regard Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as Anne Tyler's greatest novel. It's a little sombre for me. The Accidental Tourist is my favourite of the eight or nine Tyler novels I've read. It's the story of a blossoming love affair between middle-class pedant Macon and streetwise, extrovert Muriel. Macon writes tourist guides for people who don't like to travel and Muriel has half a dozen low paid jobs. They meet when she trains his psychotic (but lovable) dog, Edward.

Edward has a nasty habit of lunging at people on bikes, cornering family members in the laundry room and 'treeing' people ie chasing them up trees. Although the novel has tragic elements - Macon is grieving the loss of his son and the subsequent break-up of his marriage and Muriel is a single mother who has had to fight for everything - it is a wonderfully comic novel.

Geena Davis played Muriel in the 1988 film. I've never seen the film but I suspect Geena Davis is rather too pretty for Muriel as described in the book. She is a wonderful creation, over-dressed, too much make-up and hair, smart, tough and transparent.

Virginia Woolf said of Jane Austen that she is a writer of whom 'it is hardest to catch in the act of greatness.' This could also apply to Anne Tyler. A great writer but you just can't see how she does it.

State of Wonder

My autumnal American reading plan is going pretty well except that I sat up waaaaaay too late last Sunday to finish State of Wonder and then felt a bit of a wreck at work the next day. If I told you that the plot revolves around a woman who sails along the Rio Negro to seek closure for the death of her colleague and also to track down a formidable female scientist who is investigating pregnancy in indigenous tribeswomen who remain fertile until their seventies by eating the bark of a tree, you may think it is a little far-fetched!

Dr Marina Singh also loses her luggage, performs a c-section without anaesthetic or instruments, wrestles with an anaconda, has nightmares from the Larium she is taking to prevent malaria and dodges poison arrows. I loved every minute of this novel and it reminded me a little of another favourite, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

By contrast, Anne Tyler is a writer whose novels remain firmly rooted in Baltimore. Eudora Welty admired her work and Nick Hornby has called her 'the greatest novelist writing in English.' I'm enjoying Noah's Compass right now and I'm planning to re-read The Accidental Tourist next. I do like the way Tyler uses the vernacular to create an authentic American voice.

By the way Mrs Miniver's Daughter and Seagreen Reader and Lilac in May I'd love to comment on your blogs but your comments filter does not like me!