Our Town by Thornton Wilder – #ABookADayInMay – Day 10

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I recently started listening to Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (read by Meryl Streep, no less) and quickly decided to pause. I don’t know how much of the novel is about putting on a production of Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder, but even if it is only the opening chapters, I was feeling very at sea. Patchett obviously assumes knowledge of this play which I absolutely didn’t have.

Am I right in saying that Our Town is a staple of American high school productions? I’ve heard it referenced plenty of times, though only as a cultural mainstay, rather than what it is actually about. And of course reading a play isn’t as good as seeing it performed, but needs must – and now I’ve read all about the everytown of Grover’s Corners.

If, like me, you don’t know the play – here’s a quick intro. Over the course of three acts, it looks at Grover’s Corners in 1901, 1904, and 1913. Over that time, the main characters are drawn from two families: the Gibbs and the Webbs. Charles and Myrtle are parents to Emily and Wally; Dr Frank and Julia are parents to George. Much of the later play is taken up by the marriage of George and Emily, and what happens afterwards – though it is told in a very unconventional way.

Coming to this blank, I had no idea what to expect. And it is a lot more formally inventive than I had anticipated. Rather than simply present the townsfolk of this ordinary town, it is done in an interesting, metatheatrical way (perhaps this is why high schools love teaching it?) Characters don’t just remember scenes – they relive them, on stage, in guise as their younger selves. We even get quite a lot of the afterlife. The Stage Manager is a sort of stage God, filtering and to an extent controlling all of the goings on. He is also open about the artifice of it all – early on, for example, when trellises are wheeled on: “Here’s a couple of trellises for those who feel they have to have scenery.”

He also has a longish speech that – correct me if I’m wrong – I’d guess is one of the most quoted from the play, because it explains Wilder’s purpose in writing it. Here’s part of the speech:

Y’know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts … and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney — same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real lives of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us–more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. See what I mean? So, – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces North of New York at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, – this is the way we were – in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

And yet, even reading it on the page, you can tell that Our Town dodges the postmodern trap of cleverness wiping out compassion. I still cared about Emily and George, and I’m sure I’d care about them a lot more if I saw them on stage. There are also plenty of funny lines, and I particularly enjoyed Mrs Gibbs saying: “It seems to me that once in your life before you die, you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”

I’m glad I read Our Town and I feel like I can place one more piece of the jigsaw of American literary culture – and now, of course, I’m also ready to read Tom Lake.

 

 

 

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri – #ABookADayInMay – Day 9

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I absolutely loved the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, and naturally was keen to try more by her. It’s taken a while, but today I read Whereabouts – first published in Italian in 2018, and translated by the author in 2021. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel translated by its author before, and it all adds to Lahiri’s exceptional talent.

This novel – as so often in May, I am tempted to add ‘novella?’ as a qualifier – is about an unnamed woman in her mid-40s walking through a city. That is almost the whole plot. The story describes many different days, rather than one, but it is like an eternal moment – whether passing a shop that used to house her favourite stationery store, visiting her grieving mother, or struggling to leave the hosue, we are in a sort of everyday always. There is a sense that her life is unchanging, but she is not trapped, exactly. She is too caught up in observing everything and everyone. It’s one of several ways the book reminded me of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. They share the same gentle rhythm, and the same peaceful interaction of a woman with surroundings that she is somehow both subsumed by and separate from. As Ali wrote in her perceptive review, she experiences belonging and isolation simultaneously.

Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well. It’s probably my mother’s influence. She’s always been afraid of being alone and now her life as an old woman torments her, so much that when I call to ask how she’s doing, she just says, I’m very alone. She says she misses having amusing and surprising experiences, this even though she has lots of friends who love her, and a social life far more complicated and lively than mine. The last time I went to visit her, for example, the phone kept ringing. And yet she’s always on edge. I’m not sure why. She’s burdened by the passage of time.

We don’t learn much about the woman’s mother, except for a handful of her stronger emotions and the way she impacts her daughter’s life. But, to be honest, we don’t learn that much about the central character. This didn’t feel like a character portrait, to me – rather, it is a portrait of an experience. Of a city, but really of experiencing a city. Along the way there are snapshots – a daughter refusing to stay the night with her single father; friends rummaging through luggage in the shop that used to sell stationery; an argument at a dinner party. They are brushstrokes coming together to create a single image.

I very much enjoyed reading Whereabouts because it is beautiful, poetic, dreamy. It felt quite different from Interpreter of Maladies, which had sharp details and a depth of insight into the relationship between pairs of people. This was much more impressionistic. Both are done very well – I probably prefer Interpreter of Maladies and the sharp style she has there, but it really depends what you’re in the mood for. Being able t

The Artless Flat-Hunter by Joanna Jones – #ABookADayInMay – Day 8

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One of my favourite tropes in a book is house-hunting – particularly when it is done for comic effect. There is something so delightfully funny about the contrast between an estate agent’s exaggerated, mendacious positivity and some melancholy would-be homeowners looking at mouldy wallpaper and subsidence. Glorious.

So I didn’t know anything about Joanna Jones when I stumbled across The Artless Flat-Hunter (1963) in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago, but this title and this cover meant I couldn’t resist. Having recently enjoyed Nicholas Royle’s Finders, Keepers, it feels relevant to report that it had a penned dedication (‘November 1963. To Jill, all my love, Peter’) and, curiously, a clipped photo of John F. Kenndy from a newspaper article – possibly in the wake of his assassination, in the same month?

It’s one of those faux instructional guides that were all the rage in the 1930s, so it’s nice to see it continuing into the 1960s – and basically satirises the whole process of finding, renting, and living in a flat. Everything from nosey landladies to noisy neighbours, via finding the right flatmates and how to dodge unexpected expenses when estate agents try to foist unwanted fixtures and fittings on you. As a sample, one of the chapters is called ‘Low-flying aircraft and other amenities’. True, she largely doesn’t seem to realise that there are places to live outside of London, but we’ll forgive her that.

The maxim with which I opened this chapter should be followed by a second: the maximum rent you are prepared to pay will prove in the end to be your minimum.

You will start out by declaring that nowhere more than twenty minutes’ walk from such-and-such a centre of civilisation will be acceptable. You cannot afford more than such-and-such a rent, and you will not consider paying a penny more. Then the days go by,. You discover that nobody in the British Isles wants to let as much as a tool-shed. The advertisement boards are festooned with lies. It’s a wonder most of the postcards are not yellowed and curling with age. Why on earth do people pay good money to advertise in the evening papaers when they have no inteniton of even letting you set food inside the front door?

Nothing in here is unexpected, and Jones is certainly happy to hit every cliché, but that didn’t matter to me. It’s her lightness and consistency of tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She judges the right line of surreality in her satire, and while it certainly has no pretensions to great literature, it’s a very good example of a genre that has probably faded away.

According to the inside notes to the dustjacket of The Artless Flat-Hunter, there was a whole series in the Pelham Artless Library – The Artless Actor by Kenneth More, The Artless Gambler by Roger Longrigg, The Artless Musician by Sidney Harrison and The Artless Yachtsman by John Davies. What a fun idea, and what a curious selection of professions/hobbies to select. Well, these books won’t change your life, but if The Artless Flat-Hunter is anything to go by, you’ll pass an entertaining evening and be able to empathise all too well.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 7

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I’m reading May Sarton’s memoirs all out of order, so I’ve got The House By The Sea and Journal of a Solitude under my belt before going back to a slightly older one – Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), which has a bad title and a truly ugly cover. And yet inside – what riches!

There is something of a false start in my mind – a little prologue about her British ancestor and her American ancestor, and how different they are. It is extremely skippable and doesn’t give you a sense for what the book will actually be about, though I know that Americans are notoriously interested in their family trees and connections to previous continents and perhaps Sarton couldn’t resist.

Anyway, that out the way, and we are onto the main part of the book: Sarton finding, buying, doing up and living in a house in Nelson, New Hampshire. She was 46, and moving out to a distant location on her own felt like an understandably significant step for a single woman of her age – particularly one whose living was largely forged in isolation, as a writer (and occasional lecturer). Her decision-making is an example of how often she pinpoints universal emotions, while also applying them to the specifics of her life:

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life. I was not wrong in divining that for me, if I took it, this step would mean radical change and so might be compared to marriage. No woman in her forties can afford to marry the wrong person or the wrong house in the wrong place! So I groaned and teetered and waited for life itself to make some sign.

Off she drives to find the possible home…

We followed an interminable road through lonely woods for four miles, then emerged into a charming brick mill town sitting sedately beside a lake, and again veered off into thick woods. It began to feel like one of those journeys one takes in a dream, a journey that has no end, in search of something that can never be found, where if one wakes at last it is to the accelerated heartbeat of terror. I did not intend to live on the edge of nowhere.

But then, quite suddenly, the long road took an abrupt turn to the left and we found ourselves out in the sunlight of a small village green.

“This,” Mrs Rundlett said, “is Nelson.”

And she quickly falls in love. Through her descriptions, and her eyes, we fall in love too. My edition has photographs along the way, mostly taken by Eleanor Blair, but they are black and white and rather muddy, in the way of ’60s publishing. You have to let your imagination transport you to the world Sarton inhabits.

As I have written many times before, I don’t have a visual imagination. I find it nearly impossible to ‘picture’ the scenes that Sarton describes, and she does her best to tell you the lay-out, colours, materials, and feel of her home and garden – but, as with the best writers in this type of book, somehow I found myself there. I couldn’t visualise the scenes, but I could feel what it would be to live there. As she portrays her rooms, land, and neighbourhood, she is squarely in the midst of them. It is not an objective or distant depiction – she writes firmly as an inhabitant, centring her own experience in a beautiful way.

In that first week I established a rite about supper. When I sit down at the deal table, there are flowers; there is a bottle of wine, and the table has been carefully set as if by a good servant. There is a book open to read, the equivalent for the solitary of civilized conversation. Everything has been prepared as if for a guest, and I am the guest of the house.

The book covers eight years in the house. Along the way, we learn about her neighbours – eccentric and otherwise. But this is not like Beverley Nichols’ delightful Merry Hall books. Though broadly in the same genre, Sarton doesn’t have his mischievous caricatures and darting humour. There is a humour in her book, but it one of companionship, affection and enjoying every mood and season as it comes.

I say ‘enjoying’. She is also not afraid to tell us about her darker times. Perhaps they do not proliferate as intensely as they did in The House By The Sea, but there are some. Sarton feels things deeply, and she shares those feelings generously. Along the way, she also discusses her novels and poetry, but without a consciousness that her non-fiction is the best thing she will write. It is beautiful, poetic, and true.

A place like this is more like a novel than a poem – complex, never quite ‘finished’, operated on extended time, a balancing of many themes against each other. Work on it cannot be finished in one quite push. It must be resumed spring after spring, when black flies and woodchucks come back. It cannot be neglected for long – or you find yourself back where you started. A place like this must be fashioned and re-fashioned inch by inch. You wait and see. You wait and hope. You wait and work.

I absolutely loved Plant Dreaming Deep, and to be honest probably should have read it at a more leisurely pace. I think The House By The Sea is my favourite of the Sarton memoirs I’ve read so far, but there are plenty more to be read. Maybe, once I’m finished, I’ll start again and read them in the correct order.

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls – #ABookADayInMay – Day 6

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Cover of Mrs Caliban, showing cartoon illustrations of Dorothy and Larry swimming

Mrs Caliban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls was all over the place when it was reprinted by Faber a few years ago – one of those reprints that dominated end-of-year lists. It certainly caught my attention, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my friend Clare gave me a copy for my birthday last year, and I raced through its 117 pages this evening.

The title obviously reminds us of the monstrous figure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but Mrs Caliban is, in fact, a very ordinary housewife – Dorothy Caliban. She has gone through the unbearable trauma of a child dying, followed shortly by a miscarriage. Her husband is having an affair, not very subtly. A vision of the American dream of white-picket domesticity has been systematically torn apart, and yet Dorothy cannot escape from the role she had anticipated playing in it. Despite having to grieve the children and being poorly treated by the husband, she must still be the housewife. She must still wash and fold laundry, clean the house, cook the meals.

The only thing that disturbs this picture is that she might well be going mad. The announcers on the TV sometimes talk directly to her, for instance. It seems like this paranoia might become the plot – but it is sidelined for something more significant, which happens right in the middle of a very domestic scene.

Back in the kitchen again, she had all the salad ingredients out, chopping up carrots and celery with her favourite sharp vegetable knife, had put some potato chips and nuts in bowls and just slid some cheese on crackers under the grill. Then she raced for the bathroom in the spare room.

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy had earlier seen that ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’ had escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research, with warnings on the news about his terrible dangerousness. He has, in his escape, killed two of the scientists in brutal ways. And yet – she offers him some vegetables. He politely accepts. She slips out of the room to give her husband his anticipated meal, but returns to have a gentle, quiet conversation with this ‘Aquarius’ – who is, in fact, called Larry. He speaks perfect English, and seems to post no danger to her. And she scarcely seems surprised. I suppose, when so many terrible, dramatic things have happened in your life, you can take something like this in your stride.

Larry has a head like a frog, a body like a man, and strong, green arms. It is difficult for Ingalls to describe him in a way that doesn’t make him feel a little gross or like a figure from a supernatural movie – but we see him through Dorothy’s eyes, and she doesn’t flinch. Indeed, his kindness and interest in her are beguiling. It isn’t long before they are having sex (he is, it turns out, very human in that department). They have sex over and over, in any room of the house. It isn’t described at any length, and it certainly isn’t included for titillation. It is just further evidence of Dorothy’s new-found satisfaction in a life that is so deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.

And it turns out that Larry isn’t dangerous, really. He can easily kill – but he only killed his captors because they tortured him sadistically.

“Thank you,” he said. He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she knew of the brutal methods that had been used to ram home the Institute’s policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body.

Dorothy continues to conceal Larry, not even telling her best friend Estelle anything about it. I haven’t mentioned her yet, but she is a bright light in the novella, particularly in the beginning – somebody who has kept her exuberance, and encourages Dorothy, despite the sad and difficult lives they lead.

The end of the novella takes a lurch to the dramatic, with shocking events and revelations that are very different from the domestic scenes and the philosophical discussions between Dorothy and Larry that precede it. Somehow it works – perhaps because they are described with the same steady calmness that seems to shroud the rest of the book, however strange the events described. Because this is, of course, really a novella about the breakdown of a marriage and a life. There is a well-played ambiguity about Larry’s existence – could he be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination, like the TV newsreaders? – but it hardly matters, because either way this is a feminist subversion of the lives lived behind the immaculate front doors of suburbia. Ingalls plays the bizarreness of the plot with a steady hand that leaves the reader feeling that Dorothy’s unexceptional, unhappy life is the real point of fascination – right through to a final line that is very moving, even if you’re not exactly why.

With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 5

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Cover of With or Without Angels showing details from Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo

You probably know about Douglas Bruton by now. Even if you’ve missed that I love Blue Postcards and Hope Never Knew Horizon, there are many other book bloggers who also love him – and, indeed, Madame Bibi has already reviewed one of his books in her own Novella A Day In May project.

I’m continuing my Bruton journey with With Or Without Angels (2023). Like the other works I’ve read by him, it responds to and is inspired by specific artworks. In this case, The New World by Alan Smith – which, in turn, is a response to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo (‘The New World’). I have to confess that I had never heard of either artist or their work, but (miraculous for a paperback!) they are printed in the book itself – so I didn’t need to have a Google tab open.

Smith’s The New World is a series of 11 photograph collages, starting with a selfie of Smith and his wife in the Tate Modern. They appear in the subsequent images, but so do elements of Tiepolo’s work, other landscapes, and a floating cloth that may or may not be intended to represent an angel. Tiepolo’s piece, on the other hand, is subversive in its own way: a portrait of a series of people, almost all of whom have their back to us.

Bruton’s novella is told through the perspective of Smith, and his creation of the artwork – along with a young woman called Olivia, or Livvy, who has the expertise to do the digital manipulation and photoshopping required to create his collages.

Livvy is taking notes.

“It’s like something mathematical. Like showing my working out, my thinking.”

He has pritned out a picture of an empty space, a pillared courtyard. There is a well in the centre of the picture and maybe it was the reason he took the picture in the first place. He wonders if that can be removed.

Livvy looks up and nods.

“And sky – I want there to be sky, so the upper floor should be removed and something like a wind-lifted carrier bag falling down on the square. Maybe a sheet.”

“Like an angel,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“No?”

“Yes. That is to say, like an angel but also not. I am not sure that today I believe in angels.”

Smith also learns, during the narrative, that the symptoms he has been experiencing are more serious than he hoped. Along the way, With Or Without Angels becomes a subtle treatise on the broadest imaginable topics – living, loving, creating – as well as an examination of the tiniest moments.

As it’s Bruton, it’s all done with humanity and beauty. Having said that, I have to admit that the artworks are not ones I particularly respond to myself – and something about reading the fictionalised account of such a recent artist feels curiously more uncanny than reading the same thing of artists many, many decades earlier. So this won’t race to the top of my Bruton list, but any Bruton is a good Bruton and it was a fun way to spend Day 5.

Only About Love by Debbi Voisey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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A quick one from me, because I’m back home late after driving home from Hay-on-Wye (haul to be revealed at some point, possibly after May), via an afternoon at Hidcote National Trust and Chipping Camden, and then straight to Devil Wears Prada 2 (good for nostalgia’s sake, if very patchy). Somewhere along the way, I managed to finish Only About Love (2021) by Debbi Voisey.

After loving Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, I decided to buy up a whole bunch of other Fairlight Moderns. They’re such lovely little editions, and a really interesting range of titles. Admittedly, I read another one that I didn’t like (and decided not to write about) but Only About Love was more of a success.

It tells the story of Frank – in many ways, an ordinary sort of man. He lives in a normal house, has a job that is neither exciting nor particularly the opposite, and marries a nice woman and has nice children. Along the way, he has at least one affair – which is sadly also not that out of the ordinary. But the style in which it is told is where the unusual element comes in. Voisey has taken this everyman’s life and told it in fragments and vignettes – out of chronological order – from Frank’s perspective and from the perspective of his wife and children, and occasionally objective lists and bullet points. Since these are not framed with an explanation, the reader has to quickly catch up with who is telling their story, and where we are in Frank’s life history. It means Only About Love is an endless chain of mild disorientations, always having to establish and re-establish our surroundings – but it comes together in a very coherent whole.

The disorientation also puts us a little in Frank’s place – because the crux of the novella is his diagnosis, decline and eventual death with dementia. An acknowledgement from Voisey suggests she has first-hand experience of this from her father, and that is perhaps why this plot is told with such observation, kindness and charity. Illness does not exonerate Frank of his misdeeds, but nor should it overshadow the everyday nobleness that was also part of his character. (Incidentally, once you know that dementia is central to the story, I think it makes Sam Kalda’s illustration on the cover feel very poignant.)

The title comes from a section late in the novella, from the perspective of Frank’s daughter as she tends to him in the late stages of dementia. I’ll finish by quoting this vignette in full:

When you shave him, he moves his mouth and face around like he’s chewing an invisible sweet. He offers up his neck with absolute trust; you glide the blade down beneath his chin and over his Asam’s apple. It’s massive, like he’s swallowed a rock.

You hear the rasp of his stubble and it’s almost like the noise is coming from you, because there’s sandpaper inside you. Your stomach is made of it. Your heart is made of it. Your throat. Your insides have been transformed into a million tiny pieces of rock.

He can no longer speak, but words are unnecessary. Life is now simply in its cruelty; he once cared for you and now you’re caring for him.

Each touch of your fingers on his skin reminds him that love still exists. You want all his waking thoughts from now on to be only about love.

Set on Edge by Bernice Rubens – #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

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Today’s book is Bernice Rubens’ debut novel, Set On Edge (1960) and my friend Paul helpfully took a photo of my copy with me for comparison (I am on the right). Grier introduced me to Rubens’ work when she gave Rachel a copy of The Five Year Sentence and we did it for an episode of Tea or Books? – since then, I’ve been discovering how very many copies of her books are easily available in secondhand bookshops and I am amassing them at a rate of knots. At a slightly slower pace, I am reading them.

Set On Edge must have marked Rubens out as the individual, odd, and brilliant writer that I am discovering her to be. Here’s how it opens:

The trouble with family relationships is consicence, which is nearly always guilty. The Sperber family were guilt-riddled, and as no man will bear his guilt alone but looks for its source, finding there someone to blame or hold responsible, so the Sperbers sought out their rotten root. Each of them knew from the beginning where their search would lead them, and each was afraid of showing the other the way.

There are quite a few members of the Sperber family, and I don’t think you need to worry too much about quite a lot of them – because Rubens piles us high with children and grandchildren before we’ve really got the story underway. She also dashes between future and past in quite a disconcerting way before the story settles. But the main catalyst for a lot of the dynamics in the family is the death of Mr Sperber – and if this gives Mrs Sperber genuine sorrow, she is also ready to take maximum advantage of the position it gives her. She is constantly reprimanding her adult children for supposedly being anxious for her death, and remembering her husband with the most exaggerated affection.

The marriage of her children is her main aim – as well as the source of mnay of the arguments in the household. The choosing and getting of spouses is done with a trademark eccentricity. There is a quality to Rubens’ prose that reminds me a lot of Muriel Spark in the best of ways – a sort of jabby, off-kilter writing that is very ready to recognise the shortcomings of her characters, but not in a way that is likely to set you against them:

One Saturday morning he crossed Miriam on the stairs as he was going out to work. He stopped a step above her so that they were on a level, and taking a gilded comb from the tray, he offered it to her. She took it silently. When he reached the foot of the stairway, he turned towards her. “Miriam,” he said. It was the first time he had called her by her name. “Will you marry me?”

“Yes, Mr Levy.”

Where Miriam was concerned, Mrs Sperber knew better than to argue or question. Within a month they were married and there were two paying-guests in Mrs Sperber’s house.

One morning, shortly afterwards, the postman delivered calling-up papers for Mr Levy. Mrs Sperber never understood how it got to be known that anyone eligible for conscription could be found anywhere, and she marvelled at the organisation that could track down so seemingly an insignificant person as Mr Levy. His presence in the army, she considered, could make absolutely no difference to the outcome of the war. Something had to be done.

But the main character of the novel is Gladys, and she doesn’t seem able to get married. She is a large, plain, unintelligent, unprepossessing woman, trapped in a relationship with her mother that is somehow equally damaging and necessary. The title of the novel comes from a verse in Ezekiel – ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’ – about how the actions of parents have a lasting impact on their children. In Set On Edge, is it not the historic actions but the ongoing ones that determine the course of Gladys’ life.

Not that she is a passive victim. She certainly gives as good as she gets in this dysfunctional family, and is a force to be reckoned with. But she agrees with the rest of them that she will only truly be a success if manages to snare a husband, and it doesn’t particularly matter which (though there is a very amusing scene were one likely suitor is scared away at a family dinner party).

Later in the novel, another prospect appears on the scene – a recent widower who has made a lot of money through dodgy business dealings, and has – to say the least – no airs and graces. Gladys is in her 50s or 60s at this point, and it requires some thought:

Her mother would not be back for some time, so she could allot herself a while for thinking. Gladys would never think during the course of doing other things. Thinking was a separate activity, and could only be indulged in on its own and in solitude. She desperately wanted this transaction to be a success. Not that she liked Mr Bass so much. She has always pitied Ena for being saddled with him. His vulgarity did not offend her as it did Miriam. There were other things about him – his plain physical ugliness – that repelled her. And even as she thought of him as a husband, he appeared no handsomer. But she wanted to marry him for the family’s sake. She had fattened on their guilt long enough and now was the time to grant them a reprieve.

As the tone of the opening suggests, almost nothing is going to go well in this family’s attempts to sort themselves out – but I hope it’s also come across that Set On Edge is very funny. If you like Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jane Bowles and writers like that, you’ll love Rubens. Special shout-out for the scene where Gladys and Mrs Sperber go shopping for a dress, which I found hilarious.

I’ve only read three Rubens novels so far, but she is fast becoming a dependably brilliant author – and, as Set On Edge demonstrates. entirely comfortable in her own odd little world from the off.

Finders, Keepers by Nicholas Royle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 2

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As soon as I started reading Kaggsy’s review of Finders, Keepers (2026) by Nicholas Royle, I headed to the Salt website and ordered myself a copy. I think it was probably Karen who also alerted me to his first two books in this series – White Spines and Shadow Lines – and he is, as the The Telegraph puff quote on the cover says, ‘fast becoming the bibliophile’s  bibliophile’.

White Spines was about Royle’s love for Picador books from the 70s-90s, and his hunting to add more to his collection. Shadow Lines had less of a central focus, and went hither and thither in bookish topics – though the title refers to the line visible in the top of a book when it has an ‘inclusion’, i.e. something that a previous reader has left behind, be it a postcard, letter, newspaper cutting or something more unusual.

Finders, Keepers was going to be called Library Fines at one point, so that all three titles would rhyme, but he opted for something less censorious – if perhaps not especially relevant to the contents of the book. The subtitle, ‘The Secret Life of Second-hand Books’, is closer to the mark. It very much continues the themes of the previous book, and I was happy to return to them – Royle is still returning books to addresses written in them, phoning the phone numbers he discovers, and buying books because of the things that previous owners have slipped inside them. Occasionally, he buys books because he wants to read them.

Actually, that’s doing him an injustice. It does seem that he reads widely and with curiosity, and he might be prompted to pick something up because of an eccentric project, but he will usually try the book too – even if he often ends up dismissing them in a whimsically curt way. (He also dismisses bus journeys, people on mobile phones, and an Alpha sign outside a church – that, given his otherwise curious approach to life, I would encourage him to revisit with a more open mind.)

There are as many ways to collect books as there are books to collect.

I was going to type out a long excerpt – starting with that line, then going on to the genesis of his project of collecting ‘doubles’ (i.e. two books with the same title) and how he and the other author called Nicholas Royle are another kind of double. But I love it as an independent thought. And it is the throughline of everything Royle writes in these bibliographic memoirs.

Some book collectors choose their prey based on first editions, fine bindings, and the condition. To me, it is so much more interesting to collect books for the many and various reasons that Royle buys them. As well as the ‘inclusions’ urge, he has sections describing returning library books to libraries (quite a lot of people seem to give their library books to the charity shop?), buying books because they have Christmas messages in them, building a collection of books whose titles start with London, and the aforementioned ‘doubles’ project.

At times, I did find myself thinking ‘Why don’t you just buy books because you want to read them?’ – and I continue to marvel about where he fits all these purchases (particularly since, when I said something similar about the previous book, Royle himself assured me that he lived in a modest home). But, you know what, when I got the section on buying books because there were maps included or sketched in them, then going to the place in the map and reading the book, I was totally won over. That’s charming. That’s the eccentricity of the committed bibliophile that I can get behind. There are, indeed, as many ways of collecting books as there are books to collect.

As long as Royle keeps writing this sort of book, I’ll keep reading them. Our tastes scarcely overlap – though, amusingly, he did read Assembly by Natasha Brown in one day, which I did yesterday. I don’t think I’m likely to listen to any of his specific recommendations, and I doubt he’d want to hear mine. But I still love reading witty, friendly writing from a fellow reader who loves hunting for, buying, and amassing books as much as I do. Another extremely readable gem. The bibliophile’s bibliophile, indeed.

Assembly by Natasha Brown – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

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Assembly by Natasha Brown

A Book A Day In May is back! Inspired by Madame Bibi, it’s my annual attempt to finish a book a day through the month of May – though I already know the final few days won’t really be possible, but let’s start anyway.

Usually, I try to do this challenge entirely spontaneously. This year, I decided to pull lots of potential titles off my shelves and pile them up on the dining table. I think there are about 70 books there now, so I have plenty of choice and still a lot of scope for surprise, but slightly less manic pulling titles off shelves.

First up is Natasha Brown’s widely reviewed and critically lauded debut, Assembly (2021). It’s quite bold for a debut novelist to write something 100-pages-long – such a short book usually doesn’t do well, but there is also a confidence in the spare way that she has approached such a zeitgeisty topic. For, in Assembly, Brown tackles one black woman’s experience of often-subtle racism in a world where unspoken privilege is everything.

The unnamed narrator has, on the face of it, a lot of success. She is a high-flyer in finance, earning significant sums of money at a young age. Her boyfriend is clearly considering proposing, and comes from generational wealth. Her friends are confident and kind.

But… there are colleagues who intimate – or outright state – that she is only getting promotions because of her race. Her potential mother-in-law clearly considers her son to be having a temporary dalliance outside his race and class (“I was unsurprised to learn the titles and heritage properties were all on the father’s side. There was an uncertainty beneath the mother’s hostility that I almost identified with”). And – almost as an afterthought, in the novella’s priorities – she has cancer that she is curiously reluctant to treat.

Even her choice of career is not a neutral, but a response to her background:

Banks — I understood what they were. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance? Unlike my boyfriend, I didn’t have the prerequisite connections or money to venture into politics. The financial industry was the only viable route upwards. I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. For a future. My parents and grandparents had no such opportunities: I felt I couldn’t waste mine.

The plot of the novella, such as it is, is a trip to a party celebrating her boyfriend’s parents’ wedding anniversary. But it is really a book exploring a web of microaggressions, assumptions, glass ceilings, and the daily obstacles that a black woman encounters in a professional and social environment in the UK. Particularly when class is also thrown into the mix. Brown writes it with eloquence and elegance, and in such a spare way that nothing feels heavy-handed. Even the introduction of cancer, which could have felt like a needless, A-Little-Life-style pile-on of misery, is done with a lightness that somehow brings everything together. I found the narrator’s experience more impactful to read than a more openly furious polemic could have achieved.

What I found harder to get to grips with were the more experimental approaches. There are some formally experimental sections that didn’t add much – a couple of pages with the positive and negative associations of ‘white’ and ‘black’ respectively, which felt a bit like a high school paper – and the opening has several disjointed scenes that are quite disorienting and unclear. Perhaps that was the point, but I think it could have worked better just to tell the narrator’s story without these stray paragraphs from other scenes. I still don’t know who the people are in some of them.

Overall, I thought it was a good and engaging book, though would be more hesitant than some to announce Brown as a major new voice in fiction. But perhaps that’s because I tend to judge these things from the distance of 70 years or more. When the dust has settled, it’ll be interesting to see if this is considered a modern masterpiece, or a good book on an eternal, important topic that was dominating headlines more than usual.