The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

My perfect book. And to think that I bargained the price down at the Paperback Bookshop in Melbourne: it was in poor nick and I asked for another copy. But it was this or nothing, it had ten years of shelf wear adding character to its look, and the person selling let me have it for $10. Perfect because it is everything a novel should be. For a start, that title, worth ten bucks on its own.  It is laugh out loud (with monotonous regularity) hilarious and harrowingly sad. It has a sort of sociological background, being a look at what happened after the last financial crash from the point of view of an American type that might have been rather neglected by the press at the time. Ordinary middle class people whose financial status consists largely of a house, and as its theoretical value goes up they invest that purely theoretical value into improvements, extensions: aspirations. So when suddenly their house is worth nothing much and they are in debt, there is no way out.

And from that point we see what happens next in such very ordinary families, probably the backbone of the Democratic party in the US. What happens next is secrets and fears, outlandish ways forward, inevitable steps back. It’s astonishing just how believable our hero’s completely insane plans are. Well, of course, I kept thinking. Wonderful book! I’d never heard of the author, but I am on a mission to read the rest.

It strikes me, having called this ‘perfect’, that the last time I said that was about another book with the same setting of the last financial crash, Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings. It’s like something good did come of all that suffering, though one might argue that a couple of thin books aren’t really enough. Here in Australia we missed the whole thing, and if it hadn’t been for my reading of such books, I wouldn’t really understand what an appalling event this was in the history of the US in particular. Yes, we had all those documentaries about Republicans losing their everything and becoming Amazon workers on the road, telling us all how good that was. Keep optimistic. Look at the bright side of losing your whole material life. But this is a different sort of person altogether and I’m glad to have read about their miserable lives.

Murder by Natural Causes by Helen Erichsen

In a nutshell. Five thoroughly merited stars.

Full disclosure: I don’t know the author, but we must have a lot of friends in common. Heck, even the odd non-friend, as I discovered when the name of an ex I ill-advisedly lived with for much too long popped up on the page. Hmmm. Maybe he’ll be hit next I thought. Optimistically as it turns out. Sorry for that minor spoiler.

When I was lent this book recently my heart sank. I thought it was going to be a bridge book with a murder in it. Always badly done, why oh why would anybody do another one. But, take heart dear reader. This very clever writer has managed to put a bridge setting into her book without having any bridge in it.

 

It’s 5am. I am very grumpy courtesy of a back injury. And this book has broken through that pain and is giving me actual genuine pleasure.

There were periods in my life when I read a vast amount of murder of various kinds. But I moved on and it’s been a long time. I really opened this book up as an obligation to a friend who lent it to me, and figured I was so darned grumpy I might as well read something I wasn’t going to enjoy anyway. How wrong was I. This is a brilliant five star read – and those who follow me on Goodreads will know that I am pretty miserly with those stars. Every now and then one finds oneself reading a book with an unlikely girl hero or anti-hero. EG Queen’s Gambit and the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. I never like them, they always sound false. Probably Queen’s Gambit was behind the eight ball because I was a young female chess player back in the day and I just couldn’t believe in Trevis’s creation. And I truly hated the Girl with on many levels. This, however, is a young girl hero – well, probably anti-hero, but I often get those arse-about – who is completely believable from first sight. The story is fascinating, and I’m curious to know how much of the background setting is based on fact.

I’m going to leave it there as I don’t think prospective readers will benefit from spoilers. However, I highly recommend this not only to those who might see it as a murder/thriller read, but to those who might find a what-the-Soviet-Union-used-to-be-like book an attractive proposition also.

Muswell Press is onto a winner here and I’m looking forward to Erichsen’s next book.

Dr. No by Percival Everett

In The Guardian last year, Everett wrote: ‘I’d love to write a novel everyone hated. “Did you read Percival’s new novel?” “Man, I hated it.” “Me too!”’

Well, I didn’t hate it, but.* ** ***

* No doubt the maths amusement passed me over.
** No doubt the Bond amuse-bouches didn’t enter my consciousness.
*** I’m surprised it was short-listed for The Booker, but I gather Americans are allowed in now.

 

 

 

Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy

I’ve been mulling over this for several weeks now partly because I wish I knew just how uneasy the author wants us to feel. Are we really not supposed to see the boy of the ‘I’ in the title as a rapist? Would I have felt as concerned about it when it first came out in 2008? Would I feel as discomforted by it if I were a man?

In a nub, Miss Peach is a newcomer to town, a country school teacher who has a married admirer come to visit her. At her place she gets very drunk and at some point believes that she is having sex (first time for her) with this poet. But in fact one of her students has broken into the house, hidden under her bed, comes out after the poet leaves, and then it is he who rapes her. Well, I don’t see what else to call it. But apparently there are other ways….

Peter Pierce calls the key scene: ‘Episodes of the most uproarious bedroom farce in Australian fiction’

Seriously? I know it’s over ten years since it was written and we have different attitudes to consent now, but still. Surely a woman would have a different attitude. But when I look around, I see that at that time the female reviewers had no issue with this. Lisa Hill refers to ‘The catastrophe that befalls Miss Peach as a result of her inexperience with booze is of a different order, but no less devastating.’ But she was raped by somebody who broke into her house. Thank heavens things have changed if in 2009 this would be described as her fault, in effect.

I hated the older lesbian couple, they were overdone caricatures and unnecessary to the story; really, there was too much in the story. But lots of it was good. Although some are critical of the SF stories which abound, I liked them a lot. The relationship with his indigenous friend rang true – and does the central character no favours as Robbie behaves abominably towards him.

Maybe in the end one could say that this novel is problematic on various levels but I never wanted to stop reading it. I suppose that means something. And despite the book’s dubious attitude to the sexual assault on the teacher, Robbie is never portrayed as nice, and is never given a break, his life remains without happiness. The other thing that bothers me, though, is that he never has any insight into what he did, which led to the death of the teacher, to include another major spoiler. The reason much later on as an adult, he wishes Miss Peach were still alive, is his continued capacity to see a relationship when there was none. He thinks that it would have turned out differently if only she hadn’t gone and killed herself. I don’t know what to say.

 

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

This isn’t on my ‘better written than Harry Potter’ shelf for a reason. Was Connelly always this bad and I’ve lost my tolerance or is this particularly awful? For much of it he is merely describing the nuts and bolts of the pedestrian police work and I didn’t mind ‘She got out of the car and closed the door’. ‘He pushed his chair in closer to his desk’. At various points I did wonder why the book had to be 400 pages long, after all, people used to write procedurals that zipped along and made some discretionary decision to leave unbuttoning the fly implied. When should a rivet man say enough is enough?

But then I got to a bit where he strays and oh my goodness, how he shouldn’t have done this. I’m talking about this:

‘Rachel Walling didn’t look like she had aged a day since he had last seen her. Her jawline was cut sharply, her neck taut, her brown hair with hints of raven in it. Her eyes were always the thing with Bosch. Dark, piercing, unreadable. A vibration went through him as he approached, a reminder of what could have been. There was a time when he had this woman, and then things went wrong. When it came to the women in his life, there were only a few regrets. She would always be one of them.’

Does it get worse? And then it got me wondering if he really does write ‘He went to the car’ in bad ways too. Or was it just bad judgement to go from describing acts of car entering and exiting to the more ambitious? About then I wilted and I really can’t see myself ever picking up a Connelly again. Even if, like this one, it was a dollar purchase.

At least, though, it has confirmed my long held view that James Lee Burke is the better of the two by far.

So long, Harry.

A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

My copy features a reviewer’s snippet comparing Berne’s writing with Tyler’s but I don’t see that. The hallmark of Tyler’s writing is that she loves all the characters and therefore we do too. Berne’s are the opposite: aside from the mother, none of the characters summon up a skerrick of sympathy, let alone empathy. Not only that, but Tyler would never have such a horrifying scenario as the backdrop for a story.

I started skimming about half way through, but I don’t know if that was because it was too long or because it was repetitive in an way that wasn’t engaging – again, Tyler comes to mind, but she gets away with it.

But having put my negativity out there, the possibility remains that I was simply extremely discomforted by it because, as for all its readers, it let me revisit childhood and in my case, at least, reflect on what an awful time it was.

Not good enough…

I’m marking a couple of books today.

First up Pamela Branch’s Lion in the Cellar. This starts off promisingly enough that I was surprised when my mother, who has never lost her school m’am tongue, said it wasn’t good enough. But she was right, it lost its oomph and although I finished it, I wished I hadn’t bothered.

Second is Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomingtroll. The first of these I read, I was entirely charmed by. This one missed. I laughed now and again – the philosopher’s attempts to avoid indignity are pretty funny – but after a while I found myself flicking the pages. I suppose the title was supposed to amuse, but all I can say is that it doesn’t really get any better.

I recommend neither.

A quartet of books. Time to read, but not to review.

I guess it’s no coincidence that I am about to recommend four books read in a row since they are all authors whose works I have determined to read in their entirety.

(1) Savage Night by Jim Thompson. It’s been a while since I’ve read a Jim Thompson and this one seemed more ambitious than I recall. The anti-hero is a tragic figure. The reader may not be able to go as far as empathy – none of us have lived anywhere near this place and these people. But Thompson himself lived the life. So his clever way with words is true. It makes such a difference to know that.

(2) Juggling the Stars by Tim Parks. Not a million miles from Savage Night, but this time the anti-hero is a failed Northern Brit who is doomed to a life on the edge of failure, teaching English in Italy. What could be more demeaning a life? And, of course, like Thompson, Parks is writing for real, having been a teacher of English in Italy for his life’s work. The subtitle says it all ‘A novel of menace’. He is super good at the unease which ensures the reader is gripped in the tale’s vice. Only finishing it gives release.

(3) Harlequin House by Margery Sharp. One could scarcely change the tempo more. A typical story marked by gentle social digs, a love of words and a hilarious motley collection of characters, lead by the protagonist Mr Partridge with his dapper style and overactive imagination. Delightful.

(4) To Siberia by Per Petterson. I did this the discourtesy of it being my reading on the bus book. It definitely deserved better than to be picked up and down half a dozen times a day. It has the trademark Norwegian glumness, but despite that being the basic beat of the book it nonetheless outdoes itself with the very saddest last two sentences. Your heart will sigh when you get there.

Loving Roger by Tim Parks and The Bleeding Tree by Angus Cerini

I want to rant and rail against the system. Loving Roger is a wonderful – let me shout that, WONDERFUL – novella which is, 25 years or so after being written, neither fish nor fowl. Not old enough to be considered for Classic status. Not young enough to be modern. It’s the sort of book not read because its date is wrong.

On top of this, to add injury to insult, Tim Parks is an all rounder. Every bit of it is connected to writing. It isn’t like he does spin bowling and writes novels. No. However, he just won’t specialise and that’s considered plain unseemly now and for some time past. One isn’t allowed to be good at more than one thing. The very hint of it smacks with the suspicion that maybe one isn’t very good at either. Or, in the case of Parks, more.

He’s a teacher of literature. He writes novels. He writes memoir. He translates. He writes important books about translation. As far as I can tell, he’s damn good at all of these. But he must suffer the fate of the all rounder and somehow escape the much higher praise he would have been awarded for any one of these, if only he could have stuck to it and only it.

Grrrrrrr. I regularly get very cross about this!

It’s hard to talk about this book without giving away things that are best left discovered in the reading of. He is amazingly good at doing a female perspective, in the process making many sad-amusing digs at males. This makes me want to reference The Bleeding Tree by Cerini, of which we saw a wonderful production on Saturday night. Both start off with a killing which one might describe as a murder. In each the murderee is male. In neither does one wish to see him as a victim. From that start, Cerini and Parks go in very different directions, but nonetheless they share a point which is to talk about how it transpires that women may do these things. In the process the reader will not have the tiniest sense of sympathy for the blokes. There is nothing to be generalised here, they aren’t ‘people’ doing these deeds, they are ‘women’ and the dead body in each case was up to that point a ‘man’.

The styles of these two pieces are very different. Cerini’s is poetry, very stylised, but this, as one or more reviewer have mentioned, gives an impact which a more natural approach could not produce. He uses ordinary colloquial language as would have really been used by his characters, in his chosen setting. The action is swept along in the rhythm and cadence of the lines. Parks’ story is presented in a very naturalistic and true way. The murderess, who speaks to us from page one, is transparent. Yet at the same time, in that subtle way in which Parks excels, one realises as things go on that something is changing. Or perhaps that despite all that transparency, things were hidden. He has such a good ear, as no doubt a master translator must have.

These are both short works. Two writers who are able to distil the essence of what needs to be said without any padding. Fifty-five minutes from Cerini. One hundred and fifty-seven pages from Parks. Bravo gentlemen!

Crisscross by Pat Flower

Yikes. Another wonderful book shelved on ‘books you won’t read before you die’. I’d been told that Pat Flower was these days undeservedly unknown and with that in mind I now have half a dozen on my to-read shelf. And what better time than now, imprisoned by Covid-19, to start?

I am not the first person to comment on blogs here that concentrating on reading is a little tricky at the moment. You really want something to lose yourself in and Crisscross definitely fulfills that requirement. Comparing it with Simenon’s non-Maigret books and Patricia Highsmith says it all. Ruth Rendell on a good day. She’s a highly competent writer who captures that falling apart sociopathic anti-hero perfectly. Loved the mid-seventies Sydney backdrop. Ecology, do-gooders, and bad pottery; ah yes, they were the days.

Looking forward to the rest and highly recommend them to those who are not afraid to read books from the period shunned by so many. Don’t think of forty years ago as ‘old-fashioned’. Think of yourself as being ahead of the trend, she will most definitely be thoroughly revived sooner or later.

picture sourced from ABE Books