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.

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.

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.

The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

This must be the month for chick lit. I read a favourable review about this book in the SMH, saying that these types of books – can’t remember whether the reviewer called them second tier or mid-range or some other similar description – deserved greater respect and that this one was a goodie. Well, maybe. But really, there’s so much else worth reading and so little time and this is like a bookish version of Sex in the City or Friends. Trash really. It's about a bloke who dies and how his second family copes when he leaves something in his will to his first family, whom they’ve never met. The mothers of both these families are caricatures and really, really irritating. In fact all the bloody characters are caricatures and really, really irritating. Perhaps for a distracting train journey or when you’re sick with the flu and don’t want to concentrate…. 1 star

Roddy Parr by Peter Rose

This book was recommended by someone on the panel of the First Tuesday Book Club – Richard Flanagan perhaps? It’s about a young literary PhD grad who through a family friend ends up being absorbed into the world of one of the great literary families of Australia, as secretary, later friend, and biographer. The jacket is covered in accolades from people I respect, like Helen Garner, but somehow this book irritated me. To begin with, you get the sense that these fictional characters are real characters in the Oz literary world in disguise, which is perhaps why the folks at the book club were so keen on it – they may have recognised themselves or someone they knew. The whole thing is peppered with references to Sydney and Melbourne personalities and places, like Tony Bilson and Bill Henson and Patrick White and The Flower Drum, and somehow that annoyed the hell out of me too because they ended up being involved in the plot with White saying this, and Bilson saying that, again as if the writer is trying to pass this thing off as a piece of non fiction.
The story line - the unpacking of family secrets and development of relationships - is interesting enough but the characters don’t ring true. They keep saying awkward things that nobody says, like one woman talking about entertaining people to dinner and saying ‘I just give them a chop’. Now, who says that? It’s like something out of PG Wodehouse. And there’s lots more of this irritating lack of authenticity in the characters and the way they speak.
And finally the writing – OTT. This guy has ‘discovered’ literary language so his prose is full of dreadful metaphors and unwieldy language that just goes clunk at the bottom of the bucket. Nothing seems to live, not the characters and not the action. The main character Roddy is an onlooker, who reports, diarises, but barely lives the action. Contrived and awkward I think. 2 ½ stars.

House Rules by Jodie Picoult

Jodie Picoult is my guilty secret. She writes what I would term girly thrillers, with a lot less blood, violence and graphic sex and a lot more relationships and soul searching angst! This one is about a young man with Aspergers who is implicated in a murder but his condition prevents him from communicating what exactly happened. It takes a lot of pages to unravel I can tell you! I spent the best part of a day on the couch racing through it and as a thriller it was fairly absorbing. 3 ½ stars

The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst

The problem with books like this is that the moment you finish them, you’ve forgotten all the detail. This is a wonderful summary of history, which for me filled in a multitude of gaps and connected all the pieces together. There were so many ‘aha’ moments in this book for a person who hasn’t formally studied history, and possibly for someone who has as well. The book is a series of lectures by a history lecturer at La Trobe university in Melbourne, designed for first year students whom he thinks have studied too much Australian history and have no understanding of their place in ‘civilisation’. It’s a broad brush approach but it really provides the context that allows the rest of the detail to fall into place. It’s full of fascinating details and is one book I will be reading again and probably again. 5 stars.