A trio of mini-reviews

My pile of books to write about has been rather piling up again. So much reading this year! So I’m probably going to do a few mini posts where I jumble a few different books together…

Love, Interrupted by Simon Thomas

First things first, it is very surreal to read a book by someone with exactly your name. Particularly when I would glance at the coffee table and see my name there. Very odd. But it’s certainly not the first time I’d heard of Simon Thomas. I doubt he has much name recognition outside the UK, but he was once a presenter on Blue Peter, a long-running children’s TV programme. He went on to sports presenting, but came to wider attention a couple of years ago when, tragically, his wife died of blood cancer aged 39. And only a few days after she was diagnosed.

In Love, Interrupted, Thomas writes about those terrible few days, as well as meeting Gemma and how they became a couple. He looks at his illness with depression and anxiety that happened before Gemma died.But most of the book is about the days, weeks, and months of grief that follow – as he tries to be honest and open to his eight-year-old son, while also facing the greatest pain of his life. As a man of faith, he also documents his wrestling with God – and his growing dependency on alcohol. It is such a wise, thoughtful and passionate book about grief – and about how people either did or did not help with their reactions. I read it because I know very little about grief, and want to be a better friend to friends who are experiencing or have experienced it – and I think Love, Interrupted will help me do that. Obviously ever journey with grief is different, but Thomas is so open and honest in his book that I will take a lot of it with me.

A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations

Published four years after his death, this is a collection of essays from people who worked with, corresponded with, or simply admired William Maxwell. I have loved and admired his fictional writing, and particularly enjoyed reading his letters with Sylvia Townsend Warner and Eudora Welty. And there is no doubt that he was a beloved and widely appreciated figure in American writing.

There are some names I recognise among the contributors – Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Shirley Hazzard – and an awful lot that I didn’t. I particularly enjoyed Tartt’s funny, humble, personable account of being something of an occasional amanuensis for Maxwell. The contributors sometimes write entirely about their personal experiences of Maxwell, some write what are effectively literary essays, and most are in between. But clearly topics were not apportioned, and there is an awful lot of reputation here – down to the plots of novels being explained over and over. It’s possible that all these pieces were published separately, and this is a compilation. That would make sense, and explain why the editing is pretty much absent.

Overall, the affection and respect everyone seems to have had for Maxwell is rather touching. But it leans heavily on ‘respect’. Because he was in his mid-90s when he died, most of Maxwell’s contemporaries had predeceased him. So we get only the perspective of the next generation[s], looking to his reputation and his output, doffing their cap and treating him like a reverend old man. It couldn’t be any other way, but I did miss any affection from a contemporary – someone who wouldn’t put him on quite such a pedestal. If Sylvia Townsend Warner could have added a chapter, she would have ribbed him, admired him, accepted his admiration, and loved him. Perfect.

I For One by J.B. Priestley

First off, this book is perhaps my Platonic ideal of the musty smell of a book. Some people love new book smell, which I dislike. Some people hate musty book smell, but it is my kryptonite.

Anyway, this is a collection of occasional essays. Many of us have enjoyed his Delight – this is more in the line of grumbles, but they’re also pretty delightful to read about. Though the book was published in 1924, there are plenty of topics that ring true almost a hundred years later – on being annoyed by optimists and by strangers, on different understandings of free speech, on everyone’s secret conviction that they’re pretty good at singing. I enjoyed his look back at a moralistic science book for children, from his youth, and his analysis of the characters of Charles and Emma in there. And ‘The New Hypocrisy’ was great fun – about how everyone has to pretend to be amoral or immoral in the ’20s, regardless of what they actually do:

The young men who loudly extol an ethical system that would make a tiger look thoughtful, are now compelled to deceive their acquaintances just as the old type of hypocrite deceived his’ and often when they are generally supposed to be breaking the ten Commandments, they are in reality paying secret visits of consolation to invalid aunts in East Dulwich.

It’s the sort of totally inconsequential collection that probably wouldn’t get published now, or would appear as online columns perhaps, but it’s a fun window into how amiable grumbling has never really changed.