extreme legibility

A Heavy Feather by A. L. Barker

(The Hogarth Press, 1978)

 

Another dark,  disturbing and idiosyncratically brilliant book by this fascinating writer.  A Heavy Feather is self-defined on the half-title page thusly:  This is the story of Almayer Jenkin's progress through life.  "You start alone, you finish alone, " she says.  "It's fine to be alone, it's a revelation, truth at last."

The book does, indeed, as promised, follow Almayer Jenkin through her life, beginning when she is a young child and finishing in her old age.  Yet it does this in an unusual and interesting way: the novel is comprised of nine chapters, and each of them records a brief period in Almayer's life from different vantage points alternating between first and third person.  In the sections narrated by Almayer (about half)  she is very much at the center of the book, but in many of the other sections, different characters -- her father, her friends, her husband, her son -- take center stage and Almayer's presence in the book is refracted and tangential.

Almayer is an interesting and original character from any and all angles.  Her mother left her and her father when she was a baby, and her father, a loving but dangerously incompetent parent, barely supports the two of them with his struggling plumbing business.  He dies when Almayer is a teenager, and she is sent to live with a family of benevolent strangers whose life she fairly ruins with her naivete and instinctual honesty.    She then sets out on an independent life, first becoming involved with a pair of mismatched homosexual lovers (as usual, Barker's world matter-of-factly includes characters of many different and under-represented sexual persuasions) and later marries a kind and decent (but somewhat clueless) husband.  She ends her life as a successful yet solitary business owner in London.

As with all books by Barker, what makes this one especially interesting is the acuity of the author's perception and expression.  The book skips haphazardly (it seems) through time and space but each time it lands Barker's skills allow her to quickly evoke a complete and authentic world inhabited by interesting and well-developed characters.  And so, despite its  fractured and episodic nature, the novel feels rich and whole, and Barker's prose is as bracing, funny, and elegantly assured as always.

Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins

(George H. Doran, 1918)

 

A slight and silly but charming book set in London during WWI.  Patricia Brent, an intelligent and resourceful young lady, is resigned to her fate as a spinster although she is still in her twenties.  She lives as a "paying guest" in a rooming house along with many other sad and thwarted people, and works as a private secretary for a "rising" young member of Parliament (it is doubtful he will ever rise).

One day she recklessly tells her housemates that she is engaged to be married, and thus begins the romantic adventure that leads her to the altar.  She presses a strange man in a restaurant into posing as her fiance, and it turns out  he is no other than Lord Peter Bowen, one of London's most desirable and charming bachelors.  He immediately falls in love with the Patricia and insists that their pretend engagement is real.  This annoys Patricia and she spends most of the book trying to withstand his (charming) courtship, despite all the help he is given by his (charming) friends and (charming) family.

The book is amusing -- many of the characters are urbanely funny, including Patricia, who has a wry and cynical sense of humor.  But because Peter is so thoroughly charming, Patricia's obstinancy seems contrived to provide a plot, and this makes the book seem somewhat effortful -- it lacks the scintillating elegance and speed of Evelyn Waugh's early novels (Vile Bodies, Decline and Fall).

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

(Riverhead, 2018)

 

Sigrid had told me a year or so ago that she was working on a novel about a woman who inherits a Great Dane after the dog's owner, a friend of the woman's, dies.  This sounded like a promising premise for a novel, so I felt predisposed to like the book, but I was surprised by how much Sigrid does with this simple premise and how rich and rewarding this book is.

The narrator is an independent woman who lives alone, a writer, an intellectual, a professor.  The friend whose dog she inherits is also a writer and teacher -- in fact he was the narrator's teacher and mentor early in his career, but the narrator, unlike many of her fellow female students, did not have an affair or marriage with the man.  Instead they shared a long and close friendship.

She is surprised, however, when he commits suicide, perhaps because of writer's block, and his third wife tells her it was his wish that she would adopt his dog, Apollo, a Great Dane that he had found abandoned in Central Park.  Although the narrator has no experience of owning dogs (she is a self-avowed cat person) and lives in a rent-controlled apartment that forbids them, she agrees to take the dog, and of course bonds with it in a very real and touching way.

The story of the narrator's and Apollo's courtship and romance is constantly interrupted by observations and explorations of many diverse topics (dogs in literature, the relation between men and women and sexual harassment, competition in the literary world, life in New York City).  By including so much material that is not fictionalized and reads like essays, Sigrid gives this novel a very original and pleasing texture.  At times the writing and tone made me think of several other writers: Susan Sontag (interesting, given Sigrid's relationship with her -- see Sempre Susan), David Markson, Lily Tuck, Lydia Davis.  There is something very cool and bracing about the tone of the book that completely prevents the dog story from becoming sentimental: it's a very winning combination of subjects and tones, and makes the book seem very fresh and refreshing.

It felt to me as if in some way Sigrid had found her true voice in this book -- or perhaps it is only the matter of her doing in this book what she is so adept and skilled at doing, and not trying to do anything that is usually expected from a novel.  A smart and beautiful book.

 

The Handyman by Penelope Mortimer

(Joan Kahn/St. Martin's Press, 1983)

 

I've read and enjoyed many books by Penelope Mortimer (The Pumpkin Eater, My Friends Say It's Bulletproof, The Home, A Villa in Summer,  Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, Saturday Lunch at the Browning's), and I think I liked this one least of all.  In fact, I found The Handyman to be a almost thoroughly unpleasant book.

It's the story of an older woman learning how to live on her own without children or a  husband -- a situation that is also explored, with far more subtlety and acumen, in Mortimer's book The Home. 

Phyllis Muspratt's husband drops dead one morning at the breakfast table, and she is forced to maintain her genteel and comfortable life with little help from her son and daughter (she appears to have no friends).  She sells the family house in Surrey and moves to a somewhat dilapidated country cottage in the drab and ornery village of Cryck, which is ruled over by a despotic landowner called The Brigadier and whose citizens are terrorized by The Brigadier's "boys," an unsavory pack of young men who ride around on motorcycles damaging personal property. 

Also living in Cryck is Rebecca Bourne, an Iris Murdoch-ish author, who has lost the inspiration to write and who maniacally gardens, smokes cigarettes, scowls, and is thoroughly unpleasant to everyone she comes in contact with.  Phyllis tries to befriend Rebecca with no luck at all, but does endear herself to Rebecca's damaged daughter, who has just been released from the bin (her word) after a suicide attempt. 

Phyllis's two children are both preoccupied with their own lives.  Her (gay) son Michael is an editor at the London publishing house  that -- surprise! -- once published Rebecca Broune, and her daughter, Sophie, is a wife and mother who doesn't really seem to like her mother or care very much about her, perhaps because she has her own problems -- her husband Bron is a serial philanderer.

When life in Cryck becomes unbearable -- the titular handyman of the title, who is renovating Phyllis's cottage, turns out to be a total sexual creep and tries to molest her -- Phyllis decides to sell the cottage and move to a retirement home, where she can live safely and happily with other genteel, tea-drinking people and enjoy her old age in peace and quiet.  She arranges all this behind her children's back and days before she is due to make the move, while feeling the happiest she has ever felt in her entire life, she falls down the attic stairs, hits her head on the door, and instantly dies.  (It takes four days for her body to be found.)

Putting a nice, if boring, character like Phyllis through such dreary ordeals only to have her die accidentally at the end of the book seems rather cruel and perverse to me -- to both the character and the reader.  Perhaps Mortimer feels that Phyllis is too dull and conventional a character to exist, but why write about her in that case?

The one interesting thing about this dreary book is the inclusion, as in all Mortimer's books, of the authentic sexual lives of the characters.  Phyllis, genteel as she is, is a sexual being, which the handyman senses and acts upon (although he's a creepy and incompetent seducer, parading before her with his "private parts" bulging "through the thin cotton" of "his patterned underpants.").  But Penelope Mortimer is no kinder to Phyllis than the handyman, and so this book is mean and sour.

The Flight of the Pelican by John Hopkins

Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press, 1983

 

I had very much admired two other books by John Hopkins, which I had read many years ago: Tangier Buzzless Flies and The Tanger Diaries 1962 - 1979, a non-fictional and fictional account of the time Hopkins spent in Moroccoo in the '60s and '70s.  These books are both artful and intelligent, and written with considerable artistry and skill.

Unfortunately I did not think The Flight of the Pelican was anywhere near as good as  those two books.  It's an overwrought adventure novel,  set in an imagined South (or Central) American country, where everything and everyone is larger than life and simultaneously  comic and lurid.

Jonathan Bradshaw, the good-for-nothing scion of a wealthy and well-connected New England family, journeys to Puerto Gosano in search of his father, who sailed south 25 years ago, disappeared, and is assumed to be dead.  But when his sailboat, the Pelican, is found  the family believes he might still be alive in the jungles of Puerto Gosano, and dispatch Jonathan forthwith. 

Jonathan creates a lot of (unbelievable) mayhem and encounters a lot of terrible things ( vampire bats, a house full of genetically-deformed orphans, feral dogs, vultures), before finding his father, who is indeed living in the jungle with his ferocious knife-wielding common-law wife, and suffering from a terrible rotting skin disease brought on by unsanitary jungle life.

The first two-thirds of the book are somewhat engaging, but when Jonathan finally encounters his father, most of the buoyancy and energy dissipate and the final third of the book (like the tail-end of so many journeys) is tedious and exhausting.  Hopkins writes alluringly about geography and flora and fauna, and this gives the book a consistent sensual vividness, but it is not enough to sustain a reader's interest, for the world of the book, though well evoked, is finally too unreal and arbitrary to engage a reader's attention or sympathy.

 

John Hopkins (l) and Joe McPhillips (r)

 

A Source of Embarrassment by A. L. Barker

Hogarth Press, 1974

 

Another fascinating book by this interesting and idiosyncratic writer; I think that I  liked this best of the three I have read.  There is something antiseptically bracing about A Source of Embarrassment that makes reading it both disturbing and delightful.

The source of embarrassment is a middle-aged Englishwoman, Edith Trembath, who lives with her husband and two children in some provincial city or town in England.  She is a difficult character to describe, partly because she is so unusual and partly because Baker doesn't strive to reveal her characters: she observes them dispassionately from a distance. 

At the beginning of the book Edith is diagnosed with a brain tumor and told she has three months to live, and the book explores how both she and her family and friends respond to this tragic situation.  Complicating matters is the fact that Edith is a pathetic figure of fun to everyone she knows.  They all mistake her clumsiness and her inability to detect sarcasm or irony or scorn as proof that she is some sort of imbecile -- even her children and husband, though fond of her, patronize and marginalize her.  It is only the reader, who observes her at a slightly different angle, who can discern her integrity and true worth.

This book is also inclusive of its characters' varied sexual lives.  Attention is paid to everyone of them, and there is frank and candid mention of incest, impotence, and adultery.  In this way, the book seems very adult and ahead of its time.

Barker's writing is, as always, funny and brilliant.  Her tone is unique, although at moments this book made me think of both James Schuyler's What's For Dinner and any number of Iris Murdoch novels.  I'd  like to read this book again, for Barker's writing isn't always easy to comprehend or appreciate, and I feel that a second reading would reveal many additional delights and satisfactions.

Down Below by Leonora Carrington

New York Review of Books, 2017

(originally published by Dutton in 1988 as The House of Fear)

 

In 1940, Leonora Carrington was living with her lover, Max Ernst, in Provence.  When the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was sent to a concentration camp and Carrington "suffered a psychotic break."

This memoir is a riveting and hallucinatory account of that breakdown, and her often barbaric treatment in a private asylum in Spain.  Carrington, who was also a talented and original painter, writes with passionate energy, and the reader begins to feel trapped inside the book's nightmarish world.  A unique book.

 

 

Beverley Nichols: A Life by Bryan Connon

Timber Press, 2005

 

I was intrigued by this (authorized, I think) biography of the English 20th-century writer Beverley Nichols.  It follows Nichols from his birth at the turn of the century to his death in 1983.  Nichols was extremely prolific, publishing more than 50 books during his lifetime, which included novels, plays, poetry, memoir and autobiography, political and religious non-fiction, mysteries, and books about homes and gardens, a series of which, beginning with Down the Garden Path, he was best known for.

Nichols, a  homosexual, was friends with both Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, and was extremely social within theatrical, publishing, and royal circles.  He was a terrible and well-known snob and very ambitious, and consequently not particularly nice.  He often wrote dishonestly about himself and those around him, particularly his mother, whom he adored, and his father, whom he reviled.

All this makes for a rather unsavory, but busy and interesting life, and the biography is very well researched and written with elan.  And Connon is often brutally honest about his subject's shortcomings, which makes for a brisk and bracing read.

Nichols with some local talent

 

Puppies by John Valentine

(Erstwhile Press, 1979)

 

This book is pretty much entirely devoted to John Valentine's sexual encounters with teenage boys (the youngest is 12).  His sexual obsession with boys began while he was in high school, when he slept with many of his friends and often fooled around with them.  He can't seem to grow out of this phase and continues seducing and molesting boys well into his adulthood (mostly in Los Angeles).  He justifies his illegal behavior by telling himself (and the reader) that he only seduces boys who are willing or come on to him, and this rational seem to save him from any moral doubt or guilt.

Given the controversial and disturbing focus of this book, it's surprising to report that, for the most part, it is charming.  Valentine's lack of guilt or worry makes him a very affable and (almost) sympathetic narrator.  He describes all the boys he meets with a sympathetic complexity; they don't appear to be victims  or or sexual objects, but quite charming and appealing boys who are happy to engage in sexual relations with an older man.

Valentine worked on fringe and countercultural newspapers and always seems to be living in wretched conditions, but he seems not to mind his squalid existence in the least.  He's a good writer, and a generous one; there's a poignancy to many of these portraits, especially those of his high school friends, most of whom were killed in the Korean War.

The Gustave Sonata by Rose Tremain

(Norton, 2016)

 

This new novel by a writer I have long admired is divided into three distinct parts.  I loved the first two and did not like the third section very much at all, so the book was ultimately disappointing.

The main character of this novel is Gustav Perl.  He is born in a town in Mitterland, Switzerland, and spends the rest of his life there (except for a trip to Paris when he's middle-aged).  Gustav was born in 1942, when Switzerland and the Swiss were doing their best to stay out of the war that raged all around them.  Gustav's sympathetic father loses his job as the town's Assistant Chief of police for falsifying records to allow Jews to enter Switzerland after the emigration from Germany has been outlawed.  He dies shortly thereafter from a heart attack, and Gustav and his mother Emilie are left to fend for themselves in post-war Switzerland. Gustav befriends Anton Zweibel, a Jewish boy his age who is the only child of doting and well-t0-do parents.  The only fun or warmth Gustav experiences in his childhood and youth occurs only when he is with the Zweibels, who are very good to him.  Anton, a brilliant piano prodigy, attempts to win awards at national competitions but is always too nervous to perform well.

The second part of the book goes back in time to relate the courtship and troubled marriage of Gustav's parents, and Tremain does a wonderful job of evoking these interesting characters and  the world they live in (this is true of both the first two sections).  The reader is transported and engaged and the book seems poised to conclude in the same compelling way.

But it doesn't.  In the third section Tremain jumps ahead 40 years to the 1990s.  Gustav and Anton are both middle-aged and Emilie is now a nasty and querulous old lady.  This section is ostensibly about Gustav and Anton realizing that they have loved one another since they were young boys, but not before Anton has a nervous breakdown and is committed to a psychiatric hospital.  There's nothing, of course, inherently wrong with this conclusion, but somehow Tremain, who is usually so smart and sure-footed, falters.  All the characters seem less alive and less engaging that their younger counterparts, and the world they inhabit -- the same small Swiss city -- seems less vibrant and authentic.  A somewhat mawkish fuzziness hangs over this last section, almost as if it were written by a different, inferior, writer.