The Portable Veblen

I did enjoy The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie. It’s dark and funny with a biting wit and compassionate heart. 

It features a likeable heroine who is named after the economist Thorstein Veblen. Like her namesake Veblen abhors conspicuous consumption. When her doctor boyfriend Paul buys a humane trap for the squirrel in her loft which keeps him awake at night Veblen is appalled:
 

‘... she began to think bitterly about how phenomena in the natural world no longer inspired reverence and reflection, but translated instead into excuses for shopping sprees. Squirrels=trap. Winter’s ragged hand=Outdoor World. Summer’s dog days reigned=Target.’
 

Paul is lovable too, but his ambition causes conflict in their relationship particularly when he enters the corporate world of big pharma. The passages on the clinical trials at the war veterans hospital are harrowing and heartbreaking but tempered by a recurring squirrel motif, a charming love story and a deliciously described Palo Alto landscape.

 

What’s on your summer reading list? I’m thinking Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies which is out in paperback and I’m looking forward to reading LaRose by Louise Erdrich.

Leaving Before The Rains Come

I don’t often get to listen to Radio 4's Book of the Week because of work but I took leave a couple of weeks ago which happily coincided with some bright sunshine and the serialisation of Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir Leaving Before The Rains Come. You may remember the first memoir of her African childhood Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and the second volume Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness in which Fuller is unsentimental about coming of age in a family of white settlers in war-torn Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the seventies.  This book examines what happens after she met Charlie, an American running a safari company in Zambia.

Leaving Before the Rains Come is like catching up with old friends - Bobo (Alexandra) her sister Van (face-of-the-eighties), their mother (Nicola Fuller of Central Africa), stoical father Tim and mildly stoned cook, Adamson, are all here.  Fuller is brilliant at conveying the beauty and stupefying heat of the landscape.  Living with Charlie and their first baby, Sarah, in a cottage on the banks of the Zambezi river she has to purchase a 'wearable mosquito net cloud' and nurse the baby under it because of an outbreak of yellow fever.  When the heat becomes unbearable in February she moves the bed out onto the veranda:

And, lying under the mosquito net with my child and my husband next to me, listening to the shouting hippos, the pulsing night insects, the shrieking bush babies, I fell deeply back in love with the land of my childhood.

 It is when they decide to move to Wyoming, that illness, debt, pressures of work and an accident take their toll on the marriage and Fuller struggles to reconcile her hardy South African self with risk-averse American middle-class life.  However, the memoir really gets into its stride during her Wyoming years and Charlie's family are charming with an intriguing history. 

In an interview Louise Erdrich once said ‘To be mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.'  Fuller's conflict has made for a poignant and highly-readable memoir.

The Round House

Mom had planted the pansy seedlings she'd grown in paper milk cartons.  She'd put them out early.  The only flower that could stand a frost. Louise Erdrich, The Round House

My local Waterstones told me they 'wouldn't be stocking' the new Louise Erdrich novel and would I like to order it?  Well no I wouldn't actually.  I took a trip to Blackwells in Oxford where I could actually pick up a copy from the shelves.   It was well worth the visit.  I think this is Erdrich's finest novel since Love Medicine was published in 1984.  If you are familiar with earlier works you will recognise the landscape, some of the named characters - Nanapush, Lamartines, Morrisseys - and the 1980s setting, but it works perfectly as a standalone novel.

It begins with 13-year old Joe and his father pulling up tree seedlings that have worked their way into the foundations of their house on a North Dakota reservation.  Wondering why Joe's mother is late home from work they decide she must have gone to the grocery store at Hoopdance and decide to drive out to meet her.  Suddenly Joe's mother drives past them, very fast, in the opposite lane.  They follow her home and when she doesn't get out of the car but remains sitting in the driver's seat staring ahead they realise that something is very wrong. 

Joe's mother has been the victim of a brutal attack.  Joe resolves to find out who did it, and although the novel has elements of a whodunnit or a thriller it is really, I think, a coming-of-age story.  Despite its harrowing theme and the examination of the legal issues surrounding attacks on Native American women, the novel is at times laugh-out-loud funny. I loved Joe's crush on his Aunt Sonja the Swedish ex- stripper with a heart of gold and the chase between furious Father Travis and Joe's friend, Cappy.  The novel's denouement, revenge and revelation had me avidly turning the pages and I didn't want the book to end. 

Litlove has an excellent review (as always) at Tales from the Reading Room. 

American Classics

So much contemporary fiction from American women writers to look forward to this year. Claire Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs will be published next week in the UK.  I spotted the new Elizabeth Strout The Burgess Boys in Waterstones last week and there will be novels from Curtis Sittenfeld (loved Prep) and Amy Tan.  Best of all, Louise Erdrich's prize-winning novel The Round House has finally been published here.  I'm reading it now and I'm woefully behind with ironing,  gardening and general communication with my family because I just can't put it down!

Talking of fine American writers I've just re-read The Great Gatsby.  My daughter, Kate, was going a little stir-crazy on study leave last week so we thought we'd go and see the new film.  Some critics have thought it over the top but as Rachel of Book Snob points out the novel is not exactly subtle!  Of course, seeing the film made me want to re-visit the novel with its fine opening sentence:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had.'

Nick Carraway has always been my favourite character in The Great Gatsby and I thought Tobey Maguire played him very well and looked remarkably like a young F Scott Fitzgerald.  I'm also rather fond of Jordan Baker with her 'grey sun-strained eyes.'

What are your favourite American classics?

Bird Cloud

Above the snooty sink hung a mirror with high-wattage bulbs blazing straight into one's face rather like something John Gielgud might have had in his dressing room. For an aging woman it was frightening rather than useful. Annie Proulx

I like the fact that this book is a memoir rather than an autobiography. Annie Proulx focuses on a particular event in her life - the construction of her house at Bird Cloud near Medicine Bow in Wyoming. She wanted a house built to her specifications, using natural materials where possible, with plenty of space for her large collection of books. She wanted to be able to write without interruption, spread out old maps and photographs, view the cliff face in the changing light and watch the eagles from her window.

Unfortunately, things didn't go quite to plan. There were problems with builders, architects and sub-contractors, spiralling expenses and long, long waits for materials to arrive and work to be completed. Not to mention the fact that the area is isolated and exposed to high Wyoming winds. Bird Cloud is on the North Platte River near the town of Saratoga on the western slope of Medicine Bow. The wildlife is spectacular and Proulx weaves in details of a clever mountain lion, tagging elks for a conservation project and a whole chapter about pine cones. This book reminds me a little of The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich and has reawakened my interest in Annie Proulx. A few years ago I read several of her novels back to back and then got a bit depressed with the grim realities of life for ranchers, cowboys and drifters. One can only stand so much reality!

Now I want to re-read her wonderful novel The Shipping News.

I also have Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland to read and my author of the month is that queen of American landscape writers Willa Cather. Fabulous picture of her, don't you think?

American Literature

I must stop buying these fancypants editions of literary classics because they are twice the price of standard paperbacks. It's the bookish equivalent of Carrie in Sex and the City when she spots another pair of Jimmy Choos!

Ethan Frome is a relentlessly tragic novel and portrays a completely different view of New England to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. The tortured relationship between Ethan, his wife Zeena and the young Mattie Silver plays itself out to its shocking conclusion.

Talking of toxic marriages Shadow Tag is an unflinching portrayal of the relationship between Gil, an artist and his wife Irene who is also his muse. Both are flawed. He can't control his temper and she is a loving mother but a cold-hearted wife. Irene keeps a 'false' blue diary which she leaves around for her husband to read while her real thoughts are recorded in a secret red diary. Shadow Tag could not be considered a comfort read and this marriage turns uglier than most bad marriages with alcohol playing its inevitable part, but sometimes you need to read about real life, as it is, both good and bad and Louise Erdrich excels at writing real life.

After all that tragedy I need some Austen.

Shadow Tag

Waterstone's no longer seem to stock the latest Louise Erdrich titles. Plenty of shelf space for charmless celebrity biographies, but no space for a fine contemporary American writer. I suppose it is market driven. Here in the UK I have to order Erdrich's latest novels when I find out about them from blogger friends who are also fans, such as Frisbee Wind or from the website for Erdrich's bookshop Birchbark Books.

If you are new to this writer I would suggest starting with Love Medicine or, my favourite, The Beet Queen. Her novels are not for the faint-hearted - I don't mean that they are gruesome - I mean that many of them examine the harsh realities of life for those living on and around the reservations. Shadow Tag arrived last week and I started reading on Sunday night. Something nice about beginning a much-anticipated novel on a Sunday - kind of sets you up for the week!

Finished The Historian. I thought it was very well-written but could have been edited by at least 200 pages for a sharper story. Too much travel and history and not enough character development for my tastes. That said, it genuinely made me jump a couple of times and there was some beautiful descriptive writing:

At farms along the road we stopped to buy picnics better than any restaurant could have made for us: boxes of new strawberries that gave off a red glow in the sun and seemed not to need washing; cylinders of goat's cheese weighty as barbells and encrusted with a rough grey mould as if they'd been rolled across a cellar floor.

The Plague of Doves

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an extraordinary narrative about a French Catholic priest and a French bishop who travel throughout Mexico in the nineteenth century promoting the Catholic faith. Encountering unimaginable hardship and hostility the two men gain confidence and resilience from their friendship amidst a landscape of stunning rivers, canyons, sandstorms and tamarisk trees.

Death Comes for the Archbishop reminded me a little of a Louise Erdrich novel Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse which I read a few years ago and this in turn reminded me that I still haven't read The Plague of Doves. So I'm re-joining the 21st century with one of my favourite contemporary writers.

The Blue Jay's Dance

Just managed to squeeze in another old favourite before I begin re-reading Jane Austen. For some reason I always get the urge to re-read an Austen novel in the spring. The Blue Jay's Dance by Louise Erdrich is a kind of diary of a birth year in New Hampshire. The book contains accounts of bonding with a new baby, recipes for steamed fiddleheads and anise apples, anecdotes about the wildlife and plants around the house and musings on the conflicts between motherhood and the writing life.

I loved the story of the wild calico kitten who hides in the crawl space underneath the house, the planting of morning glory seeds around the doorway and imagining the ropes of 'celestial' blue flowers to come, the little daughter who sleeps with a beloved caterpillar on her pillow, the punctual woodchuck who stops for her lunch of clover at exactly the same time each day and the purple finches - state birds of New Hampshire - who look like 'sparrows held by the feet and dipped into raspberry juice.'

My Bridal Crown white narcissus bulbs (in the photo) have produced flowers which appear to resemble crumpled white tissues. Most peculiar although not unattractive.

The Painted Drum

Faye Travers is part Native American. She works with her mother evaluating estates. After the death of a man whose family have lived in New Hampshire for generations, she discovers valuable American Indian objects amongst his belongings. These include a cradle board, a doll wrapped in a faded red trade cloth and a painted drum. The drum is made of moose or buffalo skin, tasseled and beaded with images representing a girl, a hand, a cross and a running wolf. Compromising her professional judgement, Faye takes the drum and restores it to its rightful owners.

As the story unfolds we learn the significance of the images on the drum. If you've read Willa Cather's My Antonia you will know the folk tale of the wedding sleigh ride through the snow at night and the hungry wolves which chase the procession and the sad fate of the bride. This folk tale is also re-visited in The Painted Drum.

While I was fascinated with the history of the drum, I really liked the character of Faye Travers and her life with her mother and sometime lover, the sculptor, Krahe. Refreshing to have a female central character in a novel who is in her fifties. Erdrich writes so beautifully. When Faye lies awake at night she describes how her house releases the day's footsteps on the old pine floorboards and the sounds of the house at night resonate through the drum.

I now want to read The Plague of Doves.

More Louise Erdrich

It's been a hectic week with work and parent's evening and library book club, but I've made time to start Louise Erdrich's novel The Painted Drum and to enjoy my pale pink hyacinths.

I've been meaning to catch up with the recent work of Louise Erdrich and I'm glad I did. The Painted Drum is the kind of novel that is difficult to put down. All the old favourite characters are there, or alluded to, Nanapush and Fleur Pillager, but I really like Faye Travers the woman who finds the drum.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Louise Erdrich

I'm waaaaay behind with Louise Erdrich's novels.

I've read Love Medicine several times. I've read The Beet Queen and The Blue Jay's Dance and The Bingo Palace and The Master Butcher's Singing Club and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No-Horse.

I really ought to check out some of the later novels but I want to re-read an old favourite, The Beet Queen.

Ms Lehmann is on hold.