Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn

At some point I started thinking it had lost its way – or perhaps it was never really clear that it had a way. But it’s fun and I don’t see why that can’t be enough. Certainly I am going to read some more St Aubyn.

A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

It was a shock, coming to this from Murnane’s first, Tamarisk Row. Not that there aren’t ongoing themes, young male experience, Roman Catholicism, gambling, isolation from culture. But this one is very focussed on the teenage boy and therefore on sex: how it fits in with RC and gambling is the overarching story of A Season on Earth. I do wonder if people now can read this, especially since Roman Catholicism is so marginal to life in Anglo-Saxon countries, not least here in Australia. The shock, though, is the style. Where Tamarisk Row was a struggle – pleasurable, but nonetheless difficult – A Season on Earth is easy. If you don’t want to read a lot about Roman Catholicism and the teenage boy’s relationship with it, this book is not for you. But there is always humour, or something approaching humour there, it is not a story of dour epiphany. Recalling my primary school attempts to fast-track sainthood whilst avoiding any pain, which involved much research to find saints who had nice lives (needles in a haystack), it was easy to empathise with the young protagonist’s attempts to negotiate the facts of a teenager’s desires, if not urges, with his supposed religious feeling. It’s here that the gambling comes out and that involves deal-making with God, another RC habit which will be familiar to those brought up in that unkind religion.

Still shaking my head about this one and have put it on my ‘I’m moving on but I can’t get you out of my mind’. Perhaps that’s a recommendation to read it.

 

Magpie by Peter Goldsworthy and Brian Matthews

Not one of my GR friends has read this! Not one person on GR has reviewed it. It’s an even worse cold-shouldering than Australian books get in general and I’m guessing that’s because it has the wrong number of authors. Don’t let that put you off, this is a hilarious short novel – I would have called it a novella, but I guess that’s the kiss of marketing death along with joint authorship.

Spoilers follow.

Should you happen to be an Adelaide person, then the particulars of the university merger will seem somewhat prescient. I loved the description of the military influence on the merger – no doubt this is the case, some 32 years later as it actually unfolds. Oh, and the tone of the book has it all just right. Apparently it is no accident that in the real world now, the joint committee calls their get-togethers the Future University meetings. Magpie gets the FU tone perfect. Talk about crystal ball.

But this is just a small aside in the book. The major theme is writing and publishing, and in this case, I think it’s better to stay schtum, other than to say it’s clever, witty, and if you have ever wondered if fictional characters should have rights, then this is the book for you. Highly recommended.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

The author of has been called a ‘national treasure’. It’s at times like this that Brexit makes sense to me.

I tried hard. I put up with the wanky cleverness, that Brit fake self-deprecation thing. I looked up bullshit pop artists I’ve never heard of so that I could be in the know for the humour. Want to put that word in inverted commas. I put up with the male idea of how sex should happen, though I sped-read the first instance and entirely skipped the second. But who’s counting? Half way through the Jeff part, I decided maybe reading from the back of the book forward would be better, but it wasn’t. I’ve been to Venice. It was hot as hell. But does that meteorological fact really have to fill so much of these pages? Maybe if you are a Brit it does. Maybe Brit readers go OMG, it was hot in the morning….now it’s afternoon and it’s HOT…maybe it’ll be hot in the EVENING TOO. Unbearable tension, will it be resolved?  To be fair, there was also binge drinking and hangovers, should you find them as interesting as Amis did.

I have a female friend who, God knows why, won’t read books by women. This is going to be her Christmas present.

The friend who suggested this to me introduced me to Tim Parks. How could she have got one so right and one so wrong?

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.

Honk if you’re Jesus by Peter Goldsworthy

I am baffled by the bad reviews on GR. This is fun and, reading it now it doesn’t even require belief, it is more or less how things are. He has an excellent lead female, which makes amends for the issues I had with Everything I Knew. Highly recommend.

Rhododendron Pie by Margery Sharp

As it happens, back to back first novels. Sharp’s career intent is already present: a combination of unsentimental female experience combined with often hilarious comedic effect and her trademark delight in language including, most importantly, the vernacular of when she writes. It’s an interesting way of understanding how words go in and out of fashion to the extent of extinction.

In this tale, Ann is the youngest of a family who are awfully clever and look down upon all around them, but never without their own notion of how amusingly they do so. Ann probably doesn’t know that she knows this is wrong and that the good guys aren’t her nearest and dearest. But by the end of the book she does. She sticks up for what she wants, and for the ordinary decency of her partner-to-be-in-life against the best efforts of her ghastly father. Her mother, who throughout the novel holds her tongue, lashes out once it becomes imperative to do so. It turns out she can put her ghastly husband in his place – she just prefers to ignore him when at all possible.

Love Sharp’s light-handed touch as here, to end with her own words.

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.

 

 

 

Rebuilding Coventry by Sue Townsend

I’ve been giving boxes of books by female authors to a newly established shop up the road which specialises in by or about females. That means I get to pick through them first and keep something that takes my fancy. This time it was Rebuilding Coventry by Sue Townsend.

Much as I loved the early Mole books (not having read the later ones), I’m very happy that Townsend had a writing life past that series. It’s short and sad, while being sharply funny all the time. Publisher’s Weekly hated it, concluding ‘Many references are resolutely English, and destined to remain obscure to even the most Anglophiliac American.’ Is there a bigger crime to be committed by a writer? PW also complained of the book’s ‘indiscernible moral intentions’. If they are indiscernible, can they be complained about? But in any case, the moral intentions are obvious enough and I can only assume that the anonymous reviewer is a man.

I think I need a new bookshelf, ‘underrated’. This would go on it.

Mindswap by Robert Sheckley

To cut to the chase, read this if you like sci fi and/or humour, but it isn’t as good as Hitchhiker. It’s a very long time since I read Adams, but if I get around to a rereading, I’ll be surprised if I want to retract that statement.

I read that he is best at short stories, and perhaps that’s the nub of my criticism. Even though it’s a short novel, it feels too long.