Thursday, September 30, 2010

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

This is an odd book, with an interesting structure and uncomfortable characters. It’s about a literary minded woman, Susan, whose ex husband of 25 years sends her a manuscript for criticism. We read the story – a gruesome thriller – along with her and she critiques it. Inevitably parts of her own life story – the marriage and divorce from the writer, her problems with her second husband and her failure to realise her own literary potential – unfold along with her musings about the thriller.

The thriller is OK for the first part but becomes quite ridiculous towards the end. The characters in the thriller are unlikeable and thin, of course, given the abbreviated length of it. But maybe that's OK. It's only a manuscript after all.

The second story is of course more interesting but I felt it never really developed and that Susan’s musings were obscure. Did the first husband write this thriller to show her he could indeed become a writer? Did he intend to create some sort of nasty allegory of their marriage? I might be a bit thick, but I really missed the point of the whole thing. 3 stars for the idea.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

There has to be a name for this genre – beach book perhaps? It’s a page turner allright, the story of the lives of the ‘help’ (black maids) in the 1960s era in Mississippi. It’s told from the point of view of two black women and a white woman and I think there has been some discussion about how authentic their voices are. I wouldn’t know but I did find the characters all a little too good to be true. The white woman, Skeeter, really runs the story and I wonder whether Stockett isn’t perhaps just exploiting the history of the black underclass to frame up a nifty and politically titillating novel. Dunno.

Essentially, while it raises those black rights issues, it does so in an Anita Shreve, Anne Tyler, Bryce Courtney second tier verging-on-chick-lit type of way that includes all those relationship issues – the love interests, the miscarriages, the drinking problems, shocking injustices visited on the underclass – that so absorb writers like these. Books like this always leave me feeling like I just wasted a whole lot of hours on something that really ought to have been serialised in the Womens Weekly. Still, not-quite-chick-lit is like a bag of jelly snakes: I can’t stop until I’ve finished the whole lot and then I wonder why I stuffed myself with a bag of sugary sweet gummy stuff that does nothing to improve my health or state of mind! So read it because it’s compelling but beware. 2 ½ stars.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

This is the second time I’ve read this book (getting ready to read his new book just launched) and it is one of the most powerful portraits of dysfunctional modern family life that anyone has ever written I think. Alfred, the father and emotionally brutal patriarch, is suffering from Parkinsons, and his wife Enid is not so valiantly trying to manage his condition. But, as the name of the novel suggests, his illness becomes the catalyst for all kinds of emotional corrections to take place amongst the family members – Chip the ne’er do well son, Gary the materialist, Denise the successful chef and of course Enid herself. The novel is rich in emotional detail and I’m sure everyone who reads it is going to recognise some uncomfortable personality or experience from their own lives. It homes in on people and their personalities with all the accuracy of a heat seeking missile. It’s uncomfortable, it’s funny, it’s shocking – it’s brilliant. 5 stars.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

What fun this book was. It’s written by an American so it’s clearly a romanticised version, an Americanised idea, of what a traditional British major living in a pretty English village in a house called Rose Cottage might be like. So it’s nonsense, but it’s charming nonsense.

Helen Simonson has allowed all her fantasies to run riot. The protagonist, Major Earnest Petttigrew, is almost exactly like my mother’s second husband, who would have lain down and died for the Queen and the British Empire – even though it no longer exists. The Major is pompous and correct, but of course his view is all underpinned by tough British standards of morality and tempered with a good dose of intelligence and wit.

As an established figure in the village, the Major thinks he has his life all sorted out – and he is indeed very comfortably resigned to an ordered old age (crikey he’s only 68!) and a gentle sort of contentment. But along comes a Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs Ali, who become the love interest in the book and sets everything upside down.

We know the plot – boy meets girls, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again – backwards, but Simonson has a lot of fun with it, even while gently introducing the problems that the mixing of cultures can present. She sticks it up the British ruling class, the deadly upper middle classes who run village committees, even the brash Americans, all with gay abandon.

This isn’t great literature but I don’t think it was ever intended to be: Simonson wrote this with her writing group after having put her career on hold to bring up the kids, so why not enjoy herself? I certainly did.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Deerhunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant

We went to hear Joe Bageant speak at Glebe Books last night and he is the real thing - a southerner, self-proclaimed 'redneck, white trash' come good. He left school at 16 - all working class kids were encouraged to do so by the school - joined the navy and then, on leaving, picked up a scholarship of some kind to study. He's been a journalist for forty years. He writes a lot of what I call the social outrage genre.

Deerhunting is about the poor working whites in America, people whose earning power diminishes as capitalism thrives, who are only the next pay away from losing their homes (which are worth less than they paid for them), who cannot afford health insurance and for whom a serious medical condition will spell bankruptcy. He explores why these people continue to support the Republicans, the role that religion plays in their worldview and the reasons they refuse to seek education and advancement if it means taking any 'handouts' from the state. It's a little repetitive but he's passionate about this - or passionate but resigned I should say.

Last night he spoke with an air of sad acceptance about the state of first world countries. He doesn't believe that things will change and he can see only doom and gloom for the working poor people who live in them. He says the USA will only see itself as achieving 'recovery' when it gets back to the same corrupt and out of control state it was in when it caused the GFC, which of course spells further disparity between rich and poor and further disaster.

One of the things he did mention was the role of television - Fox obviously - as the only source of information for these uneducated people. He says the television medium grooms people's emotions - it's Christmas so it's time to shop, it's football season so it's time to cheer, it's war so it's time to fly flags - and it just guides people through the seasons of their lives. There's something scifi about this concept: I'm sure I've come across this type of mind control in Blade Runner and in various novels. I'm just as sure it's happening in the press here in Australia, spectacularly in papers like The Telegraph, but also slightly more subtly in the broadsheets. And of course on TV, though I can't manage commercial television so have no exposure to it.
Anyway, it's interesting to read what Joe Bageant has to say. He lives in a second world country, Mexico, now and seems to have adopted the Buddhist approach of living a small life well, which while it doesn't deliver a big solution at least allows him to accept what he sees as the inevitable collapse with calm and grace.