1990s

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

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I was finding 1993 quite difficult to fill in my century of books, and I asked people on Twitter which of my 1993 books they’d recommend that I pick up. It turned out that I didn’t have one of them on my shelves any longer, a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, but I did have Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. For some reason I wasn’t especially keen to read it, but enough people on Twitter convinced me that I should give it a go that I took it away on holiday and, guess what – it’s amazing.

This isn’t the first Kingsolver novel I’ve read, in fact it’s the third. One of those is her most famous, The Poisonwood Bible, which I actually didn’t like as much as most people seem to have done. I suppose my problem was with her painting this ogreish portrait of the patriarchal missionary, and then implying (or at least I inferred) that he was intended to represent the whole world of missionaries. It felt a little lazy. But before that I read The Bean Trees, I think before I started blogging, and it turns out that Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to that. I should say from the outset that it’s fine to read this novel independently, and in fact I couldn’t remember very much about The Bean Trees that except for the fact that I liked it. Pigs in Heaven tells you everything you need to know about what came before.

The main thing you need to know from that novel is that Taylor adopted young Native American girl called Turtle, given to her by a stranger in a car park. The years have passed, and Taylor is a devoted mother, unable to imagine a life without her young daughter. She is also in a relationship with a musician-of-sorts, called Jax. I rather loved reading their conversations, which were believably affectionate while maintaining a constant undercurrent of uncertainty – just how much are they joking and how much are real tensions coming to the surface? It is something dramatic that starts to change the life Taylor has made for herself, even though that dramatic thing happens to somebody else. While on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, her daughter sees a man fall into a dangerously deep cave – being so young, Turtle doesn’t realise the gravity of this until afterwards, and assumes her mother knows what has happened and is unconcerned. It is only when bringing its to Taylor’s attention that a rescue mission is mounted – despite police initially being reluctant to believe that the 4 year old has not imagined the whole thing.

The man is rescued, and Turtle becomes something of a celebrity – at least temporarily – and is invited onto an episode of Oprah for children who have saved lives. This catches the attention of a lawyer, Annawake, who decides to intervene. She is from the Cherokee Nation herself, and knows that the adoption which Taylor describes is not legal. With her own history of a brother who was taken away from family and community, Annawake sees it as her responsibility to reunite Turtle with her heritage – even if that means taking her away from her mother. (The pigs in Heaven, incidentally, are stars – a constellation you may know as the Seven Sisters.)

There are plenty of novelists who use a moral quandary as the centre of a narrative, to greater or lesser levels of success. To be honest, I am likely to run from a novel that describes itself as issue-driven – and the great thing about Kingsolver is that it never feels as though the ‘issue’  is the driving force. Nor is there any sense that there is a correct answer – as a white person myself, I am very likely to be drawn towards the argument that a child should not be separated from her adoptive mother, but Kingsolver has characters like Annawake who can vocalise that this sense of priorities is not any more objective than those which might make somebody wants to reunite a child with her ancestral community. And so what drives this novel, perfectly, is character.

Unlike The Poisonwood Bible, there are no cartoonish villains. There are simply people who are trying to do the right thing – or, with some of the more incidental characters, have lost any sense of what the right thing might be.

Women on their own run in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

That is the opening paragraph of this multi-generational novel. Alice is Taylor’s mother, and has recently made her own possibly ill-advised marriage. The family do not have the ingrained traditions of the Cherokee Nation, but they have their own localised one of women being alone – though none of the women in this book are alone as it starts, it hangs over them like a threat, or occasionally like a happy promise. Taylor’s fear of losing Turtle means they go on the run together, and Kingsolver masterfully weaves a road trip novel into this multifaceted narrative – with the possibilities that brings for funny or strange or poignant temporary characters.

As I say, it is character that is foremost – with their reflections on anything from their choice of words to their ultimate fate. Kingsolver uses her premise to give us a rich, rich portrait of many different people – even when they’re not the most pleasant people, she makes us want to spend time with them. It is riveting, as well as beautifully written. It is also evocative, not just of place but of being. I suppose what I mean by that is that it is wholly immersive.

I read a lot of books, as do we all, and it’s not often that I miss the world that I have been in once it is finished. But I wish I were back in Kingsolver’s world – and I think I might be left in the curious position of wanting to reread the original to this sequel, just to stay in that world. Hopefully that won’t leave me in an indefinite loop, but if it does, there are worse places to be. (And, to escape that loop, which Kingsolver novels would you recommend?)

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon

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The Devil’s Candy is a brilliant book with a terrible title. I can’t even remember the bizarre reason given for the title, but I bought Salamon’s 1992 book after hearing it recommended on the funny Australian cultural podcast Chat 10: Looks 3 – and posting about it here, I was encouraged to start reading it straightaway by some positive comments. For those I am grateful, as this is an astonishing book.

It doesn’t feel like something that would necessarily be up my street. It’s non-fiction, as Salamon painstakingly follows the creation of the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s famous novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. I haven’t read Wolfe’s novel, and I haven’t seen the film, and I don’t really have any interest in doing either of those things. That doesn’t matter at all. It’s completely fascinating – and a lot of that is to do with the writing and, importantly, the pacing that Salamon brings to the book.

The Devil’s Candy starts at the early stages of casting and trying to establish a final script. Not knowing who’s in the final film was an advantage for me, as it meant I had no idea who’d get the role during the discussions and auditions. I didn’t know what sort of film it would be, either, so conversations between script supervisors and directors and whatnot had genuine tension. From here, we go through 400+ pages in which Salamon observes pre-production, shooting, and post-production. Nothing is raced through; nothing is considered trivial. We spend a lot of time watching the second unit trying to get the perfect shot of a plane landing; we follow in minute detail the attempts to find a courthouse for filming. We are party to the recasting of a role to make the film seem less racist; we see an actress’s insecurities as she has to do part of a scene naked.

To anybody with a passing interest in film, or in the mechanics of an enormous production of any kind comes together, it is completely fascinating. It’s not unduly technical at any point, but you get a sense of the size of people’s roles without needing to know quite how it all works. And the central figure is the director, Brian De Palma. As director, every moment is his vision – and we follow the highs and lows of his feelings about the film (particularly as costs spiral and the studio executives get increasingly involved). It is an absorbing character study of what drives him, and how he takes on such a challenging role, all revealed piece by piece, day by day.

He may be the central figure, but it feels like the whole cast and crew are open to us. Particularly the crew; you can read between the lines that Salamon didn’t get much out of Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. We see what they do, but we don’t learn how they feel. Not that Salamon ever reveals her methods or, indeed, herself. I loved Janet Malcolm’s very individual and subjective reportage – this is the flip side. Salamon never mentions doing interviews – or, indeed, being on the set at all. She is absent from the page, and this gives the prose a feeling of god-like omniscience. She is not so much in the room as in their minds. It is oddly hypnotising.

De Palma was tense. Broderick was upset with him. She’d been insulted when he complained about the service at the restaurant and didn’t believe him when he insisted that running down Madeo was a standing joke between him and his brother Bart. One of the things they liked about the place was complaining about it.

When she woke up grumbling that she had a hangover, he said, “No wonder, you certainly had enough to drink.” Broderick was furious and hurt. She told him he;d ignored her all evening, that he hadn’t even touched her, and now he was attacking her. De Palma felt bewildered. He distinctly remembered putting his arm around her. As they rehashed the evening, they felt as if they’d been to two different parties.

The great success of this book is how steady and unshowy it is. That steadiness, the pacing I mentioned earlier, means that nothing is rushed or overdramatised; the lack of false tension means that every moment comes together into something special. And because nothing is showy, it feels as though there is no filter or bias at all – it feels as though we are there.

It’s an extraordinary book. Yes, if it were about a film I loved I might have found it still more captivating – but there is something in the fact that The Bonfire of the Vanities was a flop that makes this still more interesting. Particularly as it is not forecast in Salamon’s writing, and even the gradual realisation that the film will get mediocre reviews and make a sizeable loss doesn’t come as a ‘gotcha’ – it is part of the same pacing, as the film’s journey sort of peters out, and the book concludes. Not like anything I’ve read before, but definitely one of my books of the year.

25 Books in 25 Days: #14 Touching the Rock

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I’m out four nights of the next five, so I’m slightly nervous about how I’m going to fit the week’s reading in… but today I didn’t have much on after church, so I could take my time over Touching the Rock (1990) by John M. Hull. I was aware of the book, because Oliver Sacks writes about it in The Mind’s Eye and elsewhere, but it was a recommendation from my friend Sanjay that made me actually go and get a copy.

The subtitle of this memoir is ‘An experience of blindness’, and that’s exactly what it was. Hull had various issues with his eyesight for his whole life, but it was in his early forties – with two children and a third shortly to be born – that he lost his sight completely. By the time he was writing the book, he could no longer even tell light from dark.

A day on which it was merely warm would, I suppose, be quite a nice day but thunder makes it more exciting, because it suddenly gives a sense of space and distance. Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realise that I am in a big place, whereas before there was nothing there at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night. The same is true for the blind person of the sound of the wind in the trees. It creates trees; one is surrounded by trees wheres before there was nothing.

Each section is dated, and it’s sort of a diary – but it’s really a collection of descriptions, reactions, and philosophy about being blind. And it’s done in such a fascinating way. He writes about how other people react, and how they get it right or wrong – from treating him like a child to guiding him incorrectly. He writes about his young children gradually growing to understand why daddy can’t see. And he describes his understanding of the world so patiently and ably – about how concepts of space and time completely change; how small talk and friendships become different entities. He also talks about his faith and God, though less than I had expected.

The title is about ‘touching the rock on the other side of despair’. If there is despair, and I’m sure there was, he somehow manages to keep the book almost absent of it. He has the accuracy of the scientist with the slow, unfolding narrative of the storyteller, and the stark honesty of the memoirist. It’s an extraordinary book.

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

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One of the books I took to the Peak District was An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks – a copy I bought in Washington DC, and thus one of those lovely floopy-floppy US paperbacks, rather than the stiffer UK ones. I’ve written about quite a lot of Sacks books over the years, and he’s one of my favourite writers (and people – though of course I didn’t know him personally). He’s certainly my favourite non-fiction writer – and that’s why it’s a bit of a shame that I didn’t love An Anthropologist on Mars quite as much as some of the others. It’s not where I’d recommend to start.

The themes and approach in this book aren’t wildly different from many of his others – it was perhaps the structure and specific topics that left me a little cold, but I’ll come on to that later. Sacks divides the book into seven sections, each concerned with a different patient and Sacks’ diagnosis and study of their lives. Rather than summarise them all myself, I’m going to shamelessly plagiarise the Wikipedia entry:

  • The Case of the Colourblind Painter discusses an accomplished artist who is suddenly struck by cerebral achromatopsia, or the inability to perceive colour, due to brain damage.
  • The Last Hippie describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a massive brain tumor, including anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s.
  • A Surgeon’s Life describes Sacks’ interactions with Dr. Carl Bennett, a surgeon and amateur pilot with Tourette syndrome. The surgeon is often beset by tics, but these tics vanish when he is operating.
  • To See and Not See is the tale of Shirl Jennings, a man who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery. This is one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such an early age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing.
  • The Landscape of His Dreams discusses Sacks’ interactions with Franco Magnani, an artist obsessed with his home village of Pontito in Tuscany. Although Magnani has not seen his village in many years, he has constructed a detailed, highly accurate, three-dimensional model of Pontito in his head.
  • Prodigies describes Sacks’ relationship with Stephen Wiltshire, a young autistic savant described by Hugh Casson as “possibly the best child artist in Britain”.
  • An Anthropologist on Mars describes Sacks’ meeting with Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who is a world-renowned designer of humane livestock facilities and a professor at Colorado State University.

As you can see, the title of the collection comes from the final essay – it is how Grandin describes her interaction with the world, while trying to comprehend social mores. I have a thing about titles – they’re often so important in how we understand a book – and was a bit annoyed that this collection took a comment by Grandin and made it seem as though Sacks were the anthropologist in question.

I’ll start with the positives – the chapter ‘To See and Not See’ was completely fascinating. Jennings, the patient, technically has the ability to see – but since he cannot remember ever seeing before, he has no concept of what sight is. Having lived for decades without seeing, he cannot understand the idea of visual distance, or representation (paintings mean nothing to him). Sacks explores how our comprehension of sight creates a world around us – and the very human reaction when someone is expected to understand their world in a fundamentally different way. The footnotes lead to various useful precedents, and it’s an extremely well put together chapter.

Indeed, the first three chapters before this were also good – though not with quite the same philosophical and psychological interest for me. Sacks is very humane and empathetic in portraying (in the first chapter) a painter who can no longer see colour – recognising not just the scientific elements of this, but the enormous changes and challenges the painter must face in ways that non-artistic people wouldn’t. On the flip side, Sacks writes with admiration of Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s – awed by how he maintains his professional life.

The final three chapters were less interesting topics to me (though it’s very possible that you’d find them fascinating, if they happen to be areas of interest to you). But there were problems there that existed even in the chapters I found up my street – everything is slightly too drawn out, and without the pacing of Sacks’ best work. He lingers just that little too long on every insight, not deepening our relationship with the patient, but slowing its progress down. There are fewer tangential details and anecdotes than in other of his books, too, and it’s impossible not to wonder if this was largely a collection of things that didn’t make it into The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

It’s still Sacks, so I still liked it – if it had been the first book I’d read by him, I’m sure I’d have loved it – but it was a little bit of a disappointment after reading some of Sacks’ brilliant, brilliant work. If you’ve yet to read anything by him, head to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Hallucinations instead.

Letters from Klara by Tove Jansson

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Letters From KlaraWhen I saw that Thomas Teal had translated another set of Tove Jansson stories, I knew that the collection would be one of the books I bought for Project 24 – and, while I bought it two months ago, I was waiting to feel exactly in the mood to read it. That’s partly because I have to be in the right mood for any collection of short stories, but also because I’m savouring what little Jansson there is left to translate. I think the only remaining book is a 1984 novel which is Field of Stones in English. Why hasn’t it been translated yet, one wonders?

Letters from Klara was originally published in 1991 and was one of the final books Jansson wrote. I have to be honest from the outset – it’s probably the least good of the books I’ve read by her. I say ‘least good’ rather than ‘worst’, because it is still good – but I’ve come to have such high expectations of her work that it still came as a bit of a disappointment.

She is strongest in the longer stories. ‘The Pictures’ looks at the difficult relationship between a young painter and his father, when the painter leaves home with a scholarship. It has Jansson’s trademark subtlety in showing how two people who care deeply for each other can’t properly communicate; she is wonderful at showing the strain of silence in these relationships, where others might go too far in showing awkwardness. The final words of it show Jansson at her spare best:

The train stopped out on the moor, as inexplicably as before, and stood still for several minutes. It started moving again and Victor saw his father on the platform. They approached one another. Very slowly.

The other story that struck me as truly excellent is also the other long story: the haunting ‘Emmelina’. Emmelina is an old lady’s companion who inherits everything when the old lady dies, and who is one of Jansson’s enigmas. David – through whose eyes we see her, albeit still in the third person – falls in love, but cannot understand her, or where she disappears to. Emmelina has the sharp commonsense of many of Jansson’s characters, but also feels almost spectral. The story has no twists or conclusions, but it simply a wonderful example of how to keep a reader guessing, without quite knowing what the question is.

Elsewhere, some of the stories feel too short, too sparse. Jansson seems to have been experimenting with cutting down her prose further and further. Usually her spareness is a great quality, but in some of these stories we lost too much. An emotional logic was missing; the structure didn’t allow her usual character development. In ‘Party Games’, for instance, a school reunion is supposed to reveal hidden rivalries and resentments, but it doesn’t quite work – and female rivalries is a topic Jansson has addressed with startling insight in other collections, perhaps most notable in ‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories’.

None of the stories in this collection are bad, but some feel like they just missed the mark – or never quite got going. The title story is a series of letters to different people that develop a character, but don’t cohere into a story. Other stories are good but belong in different collections – ‘Pirate Rum’ feels exactly like a chapter missing from Fair Play, being about two older women on a remote island (and presumably as autobiographical as Fair Play was).

So, I’m still thrilled that this book is available to read, and glad I read it, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a good place to start. Jansson has done much better. But thank goodness for any of her words finding their way into English – and thank you to Thomas Teal for all he does in translating her.

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

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The Blue FlowerAin’t it just the way, in a week where I’ve proclaimed my scepticism about historical fiction over at Vulpes Libris, that I’ve also written about two historical novels that I’ve really liked? The True Heart fell within my ‘safety zone’ of post-1800, but The Blue Flower (1995) doesn’t – although it is the 1790s, so it’s hardly a million miles away.

I think I have chiefly heard people talk about The Blue Flower in the context of being upset that it didn’t win the Booker – and it’s certainly considered Penelope Fitzgerald’s best novel, as far as I can tell. I’m not sure I’d place it above others that I’ve loved by her (The Bookshop and At Freddie’s are both fantastic), but I did really like it.

The main character was a real person, though not one I’d heard of. He is Friedrich von Hardenberg, famed later under the pseudonym Novalis, and his Wikipedia page tells me that he was ‘a practitioner of German Romanticism’ as well as occupied as ‘prose writer, poet, mystic, philosopher, civil engineer, mineralogist’. Exhausting, no?

We don’t see any of that in The Blue Flower, though he certainly speaks like a philosopher (he is a kind, thoughtful, and eloquent character). Instead, we see him as a man in his early 20s, a student of history, philosophy, and law at various universities, who has fallen in love with 12-year-old Sophie. Fitzgerald’s strength is that this is no Lolita. There is nothing unpleasant on the page. He does not sexualise her – rather, he idealises her, and is more than happy to wait the four years until she can marry him.

The blue flower of the title comes in a story that Fritz tells Sophie (and others), about a young man who longs to see the blue flower. What does it mean? Fitzgerald isn’t vouchsafing it to us, though we may come up with theories. Karoline Just – a close friend of Fritz’s, clearly in love with him, though Fritz cannot see this – can only rule out options for what the blue flower symbolises.

She said “The young man has to go away from his home to find it. He only wants to see it, he does not want to possess it. It cannot be poetry, he knows what that is already. It can’t be happiness, he wouldn’t need a stranger to tell him what that is, and as far as I can see he is already happy in home.”

It is not the key to the novel’s comprehension or anything like that – but it is representative of the way Fitzgerald frame s a story. We come at it sideways and unexpected angles, hearing mundane conversations that hint towards a whole, waiting for Fritz to confide in his father about the engagement.

What makes Fitzgerald’s novels so great is undoubtedly her style. Whatever she’s writing about, she has a wonderful wryness. I have realised that one of my favourite authorial techniques is that slight detachment – the shared awareness with the reader that the scene shown is, perhaps, slightly absurd. She laughs gently at her creations, while watching them as though from Olympus…

“Sophie, listen to me. I am going to tell you what I felt, when I first saw you standing by the window. When we catch sight of certain human figures and faces… especially certain eyes, expressions, movements – when we hear certain words, when we read certain passages, thoughts take on the meaning of laws… a view of life true to itself, without any self-estrangement. And the self is set free, for the moment, from the constant pressure of change… Do you understand me?”

Sophie nodded. “Yes, I do. I have heard of that before. Some people are born again and again into this world.”

Fritz persevered. “I did not quite mean that. But Schlegel, too, is interested in transmigration. Should you like to be born again?”

Sophie considered a little. “Yes, if I could have fair hair.”

Sophie is an enigma. To others, she is an average 12-year-old. Not particularly interesting or imaginative – even, perhaps, a little stridently silly. To Fritz, she is ‘my philosophy’. And Fitzgerald balances the two brilliantly, so that we never think Fritz an idiot, yet we never think Sophie truly has any hidden depths. Fitzgerald has, I suppose, shown us the subjectivity of love – even in so bizarre and uncomfortable a situation.

My favourite character, incidently, is Sophie’s sister Mandelsloh. She has a delightfully biting wit, and an acerbic awareness of her own shortcomings. Here’s a quick instance of why I like her, in conversation with Fritz (who speaks first):

“Courage is more than endurance, it is the power to create your own life in the face of all that man or God can inflict, so that every day and every night is what you imagine it. Courage makes us dreamers, courage makes us poets.”

“But it would not make Sophgen into a competent house-keeper,” said the Mandelsloh.

It’s an unusual, exciting, glittering novel. It should be disturbing and it isn’t (which creates its own questions); it is Fitzgerald showing what an excellent writer she is. Is it her best novel? Possibly, but I don’t think it much hurts where you start reading her.

Remembering Denny by Calvin Trillin

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Remembering DennyI love Calvin Trillin’s fiction and his non-fiction, and picked up a couple of his books when I was in America last year (do other people see him on shelves in the UK? I don’t think I do). I wasn’t sure quite when I’d want to read an account of the downfall of a highschool sports star, but something about the unusually specific nature of this biography appealed to me when I picked it up a couple of months ago. That unusual memoir angle seems to be the theme of this week, doesn’t it?

Remembering Denny (1993) is a peculiar choice for Trillin. The book is about Denny Hansen, somebody Trillin knew at Yale, and the account of how he went from being a high school star to taking his own life in his fifties. Despite only knowing him for a short period of that time, and certainly not being a close friend for life, Trillin wanted to document the journey – speaking with various people who knew him at different stages, putting together a composite image of a single Hansen from many seemingly irreconcilable Hansens. (The title of the book seems one that reflects friendship, but to call him Denny in a review would feel patronising, so I shan’t.) And then: could Trillin discover exactly why it was that Hansen killed himself?

Trillin is such a fine, intuitive, and sensitive writer that he can take the ordinary and mundane and somehow turn it into gold – without ever seeming to overwrite or even display a style. It is the writing of a very talented journalist, rather than a novelist (though in his novels, style and timbre come to the fore); we hear about Hansen’s warm smile, his popularity, his promise, and Trillin makes it seem original. Even more impressive, he makes it seem personal even when writing about a Hansen he had not yet met. Of course, at Yale we get a closer view of Hansen – from Trillin’s own eyes. There are more anecdotes – or perhaps, rather, more evidence to back up the summation of traits, since nothing here seems framed in the ‘here’s-a-funny-story-you-should-hear’ that one expects from a biography. Instead, they compose a narrative of a successful, kind, loved, but very pressured man:

As Denny, he seemed to have a limitless future. We emerged from Yale in June of the year that has since been called a high point in American prosperity. With the peace-making general in the White House and the Cold War having settled into what seemed to us to be a more or less permanent struggle between the good guys and the bad guys, there were reasons to see limitless futures for a lot of people. When I talked to Andre Schiffrin after Denny’s death, he said the picture that comes into his mind when he thinks about how Yale undergraduates viewed the future in those days is Stairway to Heaven – moving up through the clouds on a blissful escalator. We had the usual problems of deciding what we wanted to do, of course, but those problems came partly from the assumption that very little was shut off.

Away from Yale, particularly as the decades move on, the portrait becomes less clear. People lost touch with Hansen; those who met him for the first time in these later years gave less detailed pictures, and seemed less close. Hansen’s character becomes more of a mystery to the reader, presumably because it was a mystery to those who had known him. If Trillin wants to join the dots between the high school success and the man who took his life, then he doesn’t quite succeed. The trail runs cold, because the character becomes less vivid.

Hansen is described as depressive, in debilitating back pain (requiring several, ultimately unsuccessful, operations), and struggling with his sexuality. Any or all of these could have contributed to his decision to kill himself, Trillin writes. But for him, it seems almost as though suicide were the inevitable end to the downward trajectory that Hansen’s life had taken. And this is where I take issue with Remembering Denny, for all of its excellent and often very sensitive writing.

My main problem with this book – but it is a problem that came up on almost every page – was that Trillin took it for granted that Hansen was a failure in his career. He was supposed (so goes the high school reputation) to be a part of a government, if not the President himself. He was not these things, but he was a respected professor with many publications to his name, still working and teaching in his field. I cannot emphasise enough (from the perspective of somebody who has done graduate study and has many friends who are or want to be professional academics) that this is a huge success that relatively few aspiring academics achieve. There must, of course, have been factors that led to Hansen’s suicide, and perhaps he viewed his own career as a failure – but there is no reason for Trillin to consider it that. It really wasn’t. The stumbling block seemed very strange, given Trillin’s usual sensitivity and empathy.

But if one can overlook that, Remembering Denny is an interesting and unusual book. Only Trillin could have written it, I think, and – for any faults it has – that is something rather special.

Ethel & Ernest by Raymond Briggs

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Ethel & ErnestEthel & Ernest: A True Story (1998) was one of the books I bought in the splendid little bookshop in Ludlow about a month ago, and it felt appropriate to read it over Christmas, given that Briggs is most famous for his festive creation The Snowman. I first heard him talk about it in a documentary that was shown a year or two ago, and determined to keep an eye out for it. For some reason, it seemed like the sort of book that one should discover serendipitously, rather than ordering online, if that makes sense.

It tells, in graphic form (not a graphic novel, of course, but I don’t know if there is a proper compound noun for graphic non-fiction) the whole of his parents’ lives together. They meet (so the pictures allege) when she was a maid waving a duster out of a window, and he a milkman who thought she was waving at him. On such premises are great marriages based. With affection and insight, Briggs charters their life as a young married couple, moving up in the world a bit, having a son – Raymond himself, of course – and coping with war.

As they get older, so does Raymond – and he begins to disappoint them a little, choosing art school over a stable career. Ethel – who has always cared deeply for propriety and improving her station – wants him to cut his hair and behave better. She also ticks off Ernest whenever he says anything she considers indecently amorous – but these qualities are offset by, say, her passionate refusal to send Raymond away as an evacuee, and sacrifice when she sees she must. (I can’t find many examples of the artwork to use, so trust me on that being in there.)

Ethel and Ernest 1

How much Briggs gets right about Ethel and Ernest is up for debate, particularly in relation to their opinion of him. The graphic form allows only snapshots from a long period of time, and no introspection at all, so we can only guess how successful Briggs was in an objective portrait (or even if this was his aim). Doubtless Ethel or Ernest would have created something completely different, yet this is a book which is filled with affection – Briggs has somehow managed to convey how dearly he loved his parents without crafting a graphic hagiography. This love is particularly evident towards the end where, of course, Ethel and Ernest die.

All is tied together with Briggs’ characteristic style as an artist- a mixture of naivety and domesticity that feels mimetic and welcoming, without being cloying. It’s not exactly charming, because it hits too hard, but it is certainly moving: an excellent tribute to two ordinary people who, to Briggs, were inevitably extraordinary.

Better Than Life by Daniel Pennac

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Better Than LifeI forgot to mention that I was over at Vulpes Libris recently, writing about Nicola Humble’s wonderful The Feminine Middlebrow Novel (as part of Academic Book Week) – enjoy the slightly bizarre comment section! – but I shan’t overlook my latest post for the foxes. It’s about Better Than Life by Daniel Pennac (published in French in 1992 and translated by David Homel in 1994) and that link will take you there.

I’m a sucker for a book about reading, as you might have guessed by now if you’ve been around here for a while, and this quirky book meanders winningly through inculcating a love of reading as a parent, a teacher, and as a reader. Read all about it; read all about it…