Re-read following its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women’s Prize. That prize had a very varied longlist of 16 books, with this I think the hardeRe-read following its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women’s Prize. That prize had a very varied longlist of 16 books, with this I think the hardest hitting book and, sadly, the most topical despite its almost tragically timeless theme of male violence towards women. It does make though for a bleak and violent read.
The book is set in 1984 Barbados (and written by a Bajan author) – in the fictional beach resort of Baxter Bay. It is tempting to say something like - the book portrays a side of Barbados that the rich tourists flocking to the Platinum Coast do not see; but to be honest I think you would have to be a fairly self-absorbed tourist not to see the poorer and darker side of the Island.
The book is written in a series of short, third party point of view chapters – the two main points of view being those of Lala and Mrs (Mira) Whalen – and the book opens with tragedy striking both.
Mira grew up on the Island before snagging an English tourist as a husband and going to live with him in Wimbledon with his two children from his first marriage (but never any of their own). After he discovers an affair she has been having, more from ennui, he proposes a return to their villa in Barbados to try and rekindle their relationship, but after a row they are disturbed by an armed burglar and a fracas ensues interrupted by a doorbell.
The person ringing the bell is Lala – a young girl married to an increasingly violent Adan. Lala’s mother Esme is dead and her grandmother Martha (who lives with her once lecherous now helpless husband) has largely disowned her due to her running off with Adan. While Lala makes money braiding tourists hair, Adan steals most of his. Lala rings the bell (picking a villa at random) as she is desperate for help as she thinks she is losing her baby – but inadvertently she has picked the villa that Adan is raiding and in the chaos he murders Mira’s husband. Lala and Adan’s baby just about survives only to be lost in a terrible accident following a row – something they then try to cover up (aided by Adan’s right hand man Tone – a rasta giglo) , only succeeding in attracting the attention of the local police officer Beckles (himself obsessed by a local prostitute Sheba who wants to keep their relationship strictly professional) – who, having been passed over for the murder case, is desperate to solve the mystery of the baby’s death.
The other characters mentioned in the above all have point of view chapters also.
Two of Lala’s chapters switch very effectively to the second person. The first is a short but tragic list - “These is the reasons why you baby dead”; the second something of a tour de force and very much the heart of the book as it explores the question “How do you learn to love a man?”
Because ultimately this is a book about the trauma women go through at the hands of men – both those they love, those they know and don’t love and those they don’t know.
It is about how experience of previous generations, passed down to them as societal and familial expectations and teachings, shape and influence their life choices and responses to their own traumas: with what seem like lessons to be avoided from previous generations ending up inevitably repeated “Because, despite your best efforts, you are just like your mother.”
Overall this is a powerful book which I think well deserves a place on the shortlist....more
Now fully deserved winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize.
I re-read this book (is it a re-read if the first time was an audio book?) following its deserved shortlisting for 2021 Women's Prize - now joined by a rare double shortlisting for the 2021 Booker Prize.
I have to say that on a second (or first) read I think the book was even better than the first time
Original review
“Stream-of-consciousness…. Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him. But what about the stream-of-a-¬consciousness that is not entirely your own? One that you participate in, but that also acts upon you?”
From your experience you know Patricia Lockwood to be (tick all the correct answers)
a) Author of the memoir “Priestdaddy” and an highly thoughtful contributor to the London Review of Books
b) Author of the harrrowing viral poem “Rape Joke”
c) Originator of the Twitter concept of ironical sexts (sample: “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter You put your whole head through me”) and author of one of the all time great literary tweets: @parisreview. So is Paris any good or not
All three are true but depending on if your answer was more a/b (or even none of the above) than b/c may depend on how you engage with the first half of this book - a novel in which the the author aims with some success to re-cast cutting edge literary fiction for the world of Twitter, but largely by adopting and reproducing the memes of Twitter.
The first person narrator of the novel is unnamed, but the book is heavily autofictional.
Lockwood has remarked with some profundity that the reason that so much fiction is now autofictional is that Google allows us to discover that it is (whereas previously we would know of author’s lives only what they chose to reveal) – a quote I found out when Googling to see how much of this novel was autofictional.
The narrator has gained fame in the Portal (Lockwood’s term Twitter - not as many reviews seem to claim the entire internet - given that the word “internet” is used at least once in proximity to the Portal) for a single viral tweet: Can a dog be twins?.
Now her life seems to consist of two main parts – sitting on her chair participating in the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal and travelling around the world talking about the newly emerging consciousness of the Portal – and the first part’s plot matches this The plot! That was a laugh. The plot was that she sat motionless in her chair.
The book is a series of (to quote Lauren Oyler’s narattor in “Fake Account”) “Necessarily short sections, simple, aphoristic sentences, more of an essay than a novel.” - a style that is familiar now from Jenny Offill (and others) and was parodied (slightly unsuccessfully in my view) in Oyler’s novel but which Lockwood and her narrator defend (with reservations)
Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connectoin had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote.
Many if not most of the sections are about viral tweets and memes, almost all I think taken from 2018, very little of which is actually explained - and I have seen some criticism of this. But then I can think of a book (a book of course referenced in my opening quote) which for full appreciation relies on an encyclopedic knowledge in one City on a single day in 1904 (or tens of pages explaining the references) and that is considered perhaps the greatest novel of all time.
Returning to this novel - for those who haunted the internet that year to the extent of the narrator’s inhabitation of planet Portal (and who are likely the a/b of my introduction) much I think will be very familiar indeed and bring lots of knowing smiles that come when you get or are reminded of a shared in-joke (and so much of this section is about how the Portal is a form of shared consciousness and shared jokes and ideas – and of how difficult it is to convey that sense to future generations or to those not of the Portal).
For those like me who did not – the choices I think are fourfold: (1) to ignore the memes altogether; (2) to cheat; (3) to google-while-you-read; or (4) (as a mid-case) to see which ones you can spot/recall. I read somewhere between the fourth (I was impressed with myself for example for spotting the reference to the “Cat People” short-story but it was a rare triumph) and more of the time the third approach – and would not recommend the first or second – as I think the memes and understanding them is important (see end of my review).
Some – perhaps many - of the references themselves say something deeper I think about the themes that the author is exploring – sometimes in a way which is concisely explored (the book is full of eminently quotable aphorisms) and sometimes in an exercise left for the reader.
One that intrigued me is a lengthy section describing watching a documentary of Thom Yorke singing “Creep” to a festival audience, a section which contains perhaps the second most insightful discussion of that song I have ever seen (the first of course to any member like me of the MTV rather than Twitter generation was by Beavis and Butthead). The narrator describes how Yorke’s almost palpable disgust at how a song which was originally and specifically around alienation/isolation is now hollered back to him by huge crowds of the very type of people that excluded him - suddenly allows him to recapture and re-own that very sense of detachment of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here at the heart of the song. And of course one thinks of how Twitter has changed over time and how the narrator and Lockwood and continually trying to reclaim the original sense of freedom they felt there against their disgust at it being the very thing that permitted and enabled the rise of Trump (called in the book the Dictator).
This first part of the novel is nothing if not bold in its claims to re-address the issue of what literary fiction should be in the 2120s. As per my opening quote the Joycean comparison is explicit – and reinforced by a visit to Dublin. And a trip to Scotland leads the narrator and her husband to sneer at tourists visiting a lighthouse only to realise later that the tourists are paying homage to Virginia Woolf.
Another trip leads her to view an ancient cairn and reflect: “They said all you needed to be remembered was one small stone piled on another,” she thinks to herself. “Wasn’t that what we were doing in the portal, small stone on small stone on small stone?”
The second part of the novel gives what seems a very abrupt and very deliberate change of gears. The narrator’s sister is pregnant and the LOL-ing at the baby’s head on its scans suddenly takes a dramatic turn after an urgent message from her mother asking her to fly back to the family home, as Doctors have discovered that the baby is suffering from Proteus syndrome (gigantism as suffered by the elephant man) and will likely not survive – the only real question being if her sister will also survive given Ohio laws which even make it illegal to induce a pregnant woman weeks before term. This leads to agony for her strongly, in fact militantly pro-life father – forced now to “live in the world he has created” (that itself an echo of course of the Twitterati’s dilemma in Trumps America) . And then unexpectedly the baby survives and the book takes an even more serious turn.
Of course it is tempting to view the baby as a metaphor – a metaphor for the unexpected survival but also unusual and unprecedented development of Twitter as a medium, for the hyperbole and gigantism of the internet; or alternatively (as the narrator increasingly finds true feelings and depth of emotion in her love for her niece) as a metaphor for the difference between the Portal and IRL. And both of these metaphors are absolutely relevant.
But also as the narrator remarks “It spoke of something deep in human beings how hard she had to pinch herself when she started thinking of it all as a metaphor.” – because this part of the book is given much greater emotional heft when you realise it is the least fictional part and that it is very much about Lockwood’s own experiences and her own niece. This section will I think be seen as emotionally moving by some and emotionally manipulative by others – I was much more in the former camp.
It also of course causes the narrator to examine her use of the Portal: her popular and archly ironical persona there which has given her whatever measure of identity and recognition she has “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”; her realisation that the universal shared experiences of the internet do not match the individual or closely shared nature of personal tragedy “The previous unshakeable conviction that someone else was writing the inside of her head was gone”; the sudden realisation that the need to participate in a communal consciousness and affirm and even create a shared experience is replaced by the need to participate in her family's personal tragedy "She fell heavily out of the broad warm us, out of the story that had seemed , up until the last minute, to require her perpetual co-writing" but also a recognition that much of what she has learn through Twitter and the shared vocabulary and shortcuts she has established with her sister do enable them to find a way to navigate through and communicate during an impossible situation - “For whatever lives we lead they do prepare us for this moment.”
But the strongest parts of this book are those which just examine the miracle of life, the smell of a baby’s head, that celebrate the small battles that her niece wins in a war that she was already destined to lose, even before her birth. And there are some hugely emotional moments - for example a diaper change, the second appearance of a poodle.
There is so much else I could say about this book but I would urge people to engage with it. For anyone with an LRB subscription many ideas in the book were included in a British Museum lecture by the author shortly before lockdown (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n...) a lecture which the narrator also gives towards the end of the book in a nice meta twist.
I first listened to this book in Audiobook form – where it is excellently narrated by Kristen Sieh who captures, I think, the tone of the book perfectly. If I had any criticism it would probably be to drop the accents – particularly the Australian one.
One thing about listening to the Audiobook while say walking your dog (as I did) is that unlike reading a Kindle version, or a paper copy (but with a smartphone by your side) it is not so easy to Google the various references/memes etc and find yourself drawn into your own portal. Normally I would say that is a good thing – I aim (not always successfully) to use literature to escape from the omni-presence of the screen – but here I think this does not allow full identification with the underlying worldview at the centre of the book.
And as for the cheating option – well this link (which I found after I finished helps) https://lithub.com/all-the-memes-in-p... but again I think turns entering the portal into staying on the outside looking in and so does not really work.
My thanks to Bloomsbury UK Audio for an Audiobook ARC via NetGalley...more
I re-read this following its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize. A second read only confirmed my impression that its omission from the 2I re-read this following its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize. A second read only confirmed my impression that its omission from the 2021 Booker Prize (as well as that of "Assembly") is rather inexplicable and considerably to the detriment of that prize.
Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.
Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel was the ambitious, powerful if somewhat flawed historical epic “Homegoing” which told, in two diverging and the intersecting multi-generational tales, the missing parts of history in Ghana and America.
This her follow-up is in my view an even better book – and made I think even more impressive by the divergence in style and themes explored of its predecessor. For at heart this is an examination of religious and scientific belief – their clashes and similarities – and about how either holds up refracted through a lens of loss, addiction and underlying racism.
There are some strong overlaps between this book and the Booker-shortlisted “Real Life” – although in this novel the scientific research (here into mice rather than nematodes) is central to the book and non-autobiographical in nature (actually deriving from research done by the author’s friend – see link below) rather than serving as a simply a autobiographical vehicle for an exploration of other themes. I have to say also that I think this is a far more mature and coherent novel than the debut “Real Life”.
The author herself was was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama.
Over time the backstory of our first party narrator Gifty emerges.
She was born in the US some time after her driven and very religious Ghanian mother wins the Green Card lottery and moves to Alabama, with her at the time only child – Nana – to stay with a cousin doing a PhD there, before settling and later joined, rather reluctantly, by her older and rather easygoing husband – known as Chin Chin Man. The family struggle in America – Gifty’s mother works as a home help for the elderly (starting with a bigoted older white man), Chin Chin Man gets a job as a janitor but is weighted down by the overt racism he experiences – but Gifty’s mother joins an Assembly of God church where she gains a community (although move covert racial prejudice is never far from the surface no matter how much she chooses to ignore it).
Gifty too develops a childlike faith – which she expresses via a coded diary written to God – extracts of which litter the book – and the same impulses that drive her to faith drive her to an early interest in science
Back then, I approached my piety the same way I approached my studies: fastidiously. I spent the summer after my eighth birthday reading my Bible cover to cover, a feat that even my mother admitted she had never done. I wanted, above all else, to be good. And I wanted the path to that goodness to be clear. I suspect that this is why I excelled at math and science, where the rules are laid out step by step, where if you did something exactly the way it was supposed to be done, the result would be exactly as it was expected to be.
Nana as a young child is a successful soccer player – but quits after a racist incident – only for a growth spurt to help him discover basketball which does far more to cement both his and the family’s popularity and set out a potential future of College scholarships. But when he is injured on court, his family gradually realise that he has become addicted to OxyContin – an addiction which rapidly spins out of control and leads to his death from overdose. In turn this causes Gifty to question her hitherto unshakeable childlike faith, and her mother to sink into depression and Ambien dependency (with the 12 year old Gifty then sent to Ghana for a period while her mother just pulls herself together).
The book is set sixteen years later – Gifty is now a studying for a PhD in Neuroscience in California. Gifty’s PhD is on Neural circuits of reward-seeking behaviour – in simple terms she performs a relatively classical experiment on mice who after working out that a lever causes a reward of food, then find it starts giving them random shocks. Most mice eventually stop pressing the lever but a small cohort carry on pressing the lever no matter how frequent the shocks – effectively completely risk-averse reward seeking behaviour (something like addiction in humans). Her work is looking at whether.
optogenetics [can] be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?
And of course function as a way for her to work through her confusion and shame about why she was unable to save her brother.
At the book’s start, her mother seems to have relapsed into depression and Anhedonia (an inability to drive pleasure) comes to stay with her and this causes Gifty to look back on her past and try to come to terms once more with everything that happened and to try to come to terms with it and this in turn leads her to reflect on her journey through religious faith and scientific belief – and to realise that they are simultaneously in conflict but also two sides of the same coin, and that ultimately neither has really give her the answers she seek but that between both of them and the fundamental importance of relationships there is an answer to be found.
This was a book where I found myself repeatedly highlighting passages – here are some of my favourites
In the book of Matthew, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Here is a separation. Your heart, the part of you that feels. Your mind, the part of you that thinks. Your soul, the part of you that is. I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul. Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about the part of humans that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our brains—mysterious, elegant, essential. Everything we don’t understand about what makes a person a person can be uncovered once we understand this organ. There is no separation. Our brains are our hearts that feel and our minds that think and our souls that are. But when I was a child I called this essence a soul and I believed in its supremacy over the mind and the heart, its immutability and connection to Christ himself.
At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become— a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain. I have indeed given that organ a kind of supremacy, believing and hoping that all of the answers to all of the questions that I have can and must be contained therein. But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have so many of the same questions, like “Do we have control over our thoughts?,” but I am looking for a different way to answer them. I am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.
This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.
I felt this was an excellent book and it also felt an intelligent and convincing one. The book is peppered with religious references and bible verse (ones Gifty learned as a child) and as a Christian I can say that they are all quoted in context and with understanding. And the scientific details, which at times get a little complex, are also never less than convincing and seem to fit my (more limited) understanding of the actual science involved (see paper below).
But if that and my review makes this book feel like some form of heavy philosophical tome – it is much more than that. Because at the heart there is a tale of: fraternal heartbreak; of a mother-daughter relationship which never really functions both as a mother-child and then a daughter-elderly dependent; of insidious racism never really seen as such until much later and absorbed more as unworthiness or shame; and even a very tentative attempt at romance which does provide some form of ultimate redemption.
This is a book which poses lots of questions, and while not giving any easy answers (because ultimately the questions are unanswerable), gives plenty for the reader to reflect on.
I thought it was outstanding.
Two, I hope interesting links referenced in the Acknowledgements.
The first is the doctoral work co-authored by the author’s friend Tina Kim on which Gifty’s work is based.
The second a short story written by the author and published in Guernica magazine – from which the novel (in the author’s words) picks up characters and questions and reshapes and repurposes them to ask new questions.
I re-read this book after its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize.
A remarkable story of rural 21st ceWinner of the 2021 Costa Novel Prize
I re-read this book after its deserved shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize.
A remarkable story of rural 21st century marginalisation; repercussions of life changing events; resilience to trauma; and recalibration of identity and relationships.
On my second read I found the book equally enjoyable - one thing that did strike me was how much of the book's underlying story is hinted at in the very brief first chapter.
ORIGINAL REVIEW (DECEMBER 2019)
This is the first book I have read by Claire Fuller, despite it being her fourth novel, but I was aware of her work given that her first book won the prestigious Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction in 2015, defeating the phenomenon that was “Elizabeth is Missing” (to give an example of the ability of the prize to identify brilliant talent – the other recent winners are Eimear McBride, Lisa McInerney, Francis Spufford, Preti Taneja, Claire Adam and Derek Owusu – if you are looking for a list of authors whose careers you should follow that I would suggest would make a very good start); her second novel shortlisted for the Encore prize for second novels (winners of that prize run by the Royal Society of Literature include Anne Enright, Ali Smith, Sally Rooney and a host of other Booker listed authors).
I am not sure I have read a book whose opening had such unsettling and unfortunate resonances for me - a story of two 51 year old twins whose mother suffers a stroke, and with much of the opening plot of the book about discovering the costs of funerals – which uncannily sums up the start and end of the difficult last twelve months of my own life.
The book is set in a rural part of present day Wiltshire - Jeanie and Julius Seeder (no one is sure if the name was an elaborate joke by their father) despite their age, live with their mother Dot in a small cottage which still has an outside toilet.
Dot and Jeanie grow vegetables which they sell both at the bottom of their garden in an honest box and more recently to an upmarket deli in the local village. Julius does a variety of casual labouring jobs for cash.
Their ability to survive is helped by a long arrangement with the local farmer and landowner Rawson that they can rent the cottage for free in perpetuity – something which dates back to their father’s death 40 year’s previously, decapitated while driving Rawson’s new tractor (after an accident the twins believe was due to faulty bolts fitted by Rawson).
The family’s life is circumscribed: Jeanie by a childhood heart condition and by a lac of desire for things other women seem to her to seek for – fashion, sex, money; Julius by the after effects of the accident which mean he suffers severe travel sickness and the unspoken requirement to care for his sister; the whole family by a fierce independence, self-sufficiency, and bond over folk music and their shared beliefs about who they are and their family story.
When at the book’s start the twins find their mother dead from what later turns out to be a stroke they are forced to: engage with the other people (including Rawson and Dot’s best friend Bridget); engage with the outside world (for example the need to register the death and incur the costs of a funeral); confront their lack of any money; deal with those who quickly move to exploit their vulnerability; come to terms with discrepancies between what they have always believed about themselves and their history and what seems to be the emerging reality of their situation; and to reset their own relationship.
To say much more would be to spoil the story – a relatively simple but powerful tale of rural poverty, of those marginalized from 21st Century English society (both exploited by the establishment and ignored by progressives) and at heart a tale of resilience when everything you know about yourself changes and of a recalibration of beliefs, lifestyle and relationships in the face of the repercussions of a life changing traumatic event.
My thanks to Penguin General UK for an ARC via NetGalley...more
I re-read it after its deserving shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize (one of many prize listings including CostaWinner of the 2021 Women’s Prize.
I re-read it after its deserving shortlisting for the 2021 Women's Prize (one of many prize listings including Costa and Hugo/Nebula). The second time around I read a Waterstones special edition with an additional chapter at the end of the book and I found the book equally enjoyable.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
The author’s long awaited second novel after her astonishingly ambitious debut novel - one that I read in a single sitting (this follow up I should stress not the debut!)
This book as has been well documented is not a follow up to “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” but has its origins much earlier in the author’s reading and writing life:
In my twenties, I loved the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. They’re generally very short, very precise and very jewel-like. Some of the worlds he created are strange — worlds that pose philosophical questions and make you think in ways you’ve never thought before. One world, for example, is an endless library (The Library of Babel). So at some point in the 1980s I wrote a few pages about a Borgesian sort of world which consisted of a vast house in which an ocean was imprisoned. Two characters inhabited it; one character understood the house instinctively and could navigate it easily and the other character could only really increase his understanding of the house by studying the first character
Other very explicit literary influences on this novel include:
- Borges’s “The House of Asterion” - CS Lewis’s “The Magician’s Nephew” (which features in the epigraph, the name of a major character) – in particular Charn and the World Between the Woods - Lewis’s “The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe” as more explicitly signalled by the front cover the edition I read and in a remark about a young child meeting a faun in a snowy landscape - The Carceri d'invenzione drawings of Giambattista Piranesi (chosen for that reason as Piranesi's nickname) - The philiosophical writings of Lewis’s fellow Inkling Owen Barfield particularly his ideas of original participation and (developed jointly with Lewis) chronological snobbery - (and very clearly) Plato’s allegory of the cave
With underlying themes including isolation (and it’s strange pleasures) and the relation of man to the natural world - so a book that is both timeless and timely in a year when COVID lockdowns and climate change concerns top the news agenda and pertinent to the author who wrote this book while suffering with chronic illness that largely lead her to being physically confined pre-COVID.
My overwhelming take-away from the book was that (not unlike some of Lewis’s imagery) much of the book is a metaphor for the imagination and in particular the imagination of a reader of fiction.
Certainly my own experience on reading this novel was as follows: short bafflement followed by intrigue as I setted into the world of the book; annoyance as our own world seemed to intervene on the edges of this world; disappointment at how the eventual return to the real world was somehow simultaneously disappointingly mundane but also unsatisfactorily mysterious; finally a desire to be able simply to return to the pristine world of the book and to ignore the real world.
And somehow and very cleverly that also on a higher level reflects much of my own experience as a reader in general (not just for this book); and on a lower level reflects the experiences of many of those in the book (Piranesi but also Raphael and Ritter).
An aspect I found frustrating was when the book turned from the world of speculation to the world of resolution as we read the narrator's old journals (and gain a greater understanding than he initially has).
Again though I see this as a metaphor for the way in which fiction at its best tries to open up possibilities - whereas non-fiction at its best tries to close them down in a search for the truth.
Definitely a book and a world to revisit from time to time and a book that reminded me of what drew me to reading fiction as a child and has sustained my interest for nearly a half-century....more
I re-read this book as part of a re-read of the Women's Prize shortlist having previously read it 13 months earlier just before the 2020 Booker Prize I re-read this book as part of a re-read of the Women's Prize shortlist having previously read it 13 months earlier just before the 2020 Booker Prize as I thought it might be longlisted (I read "Shuggie Bain" the same week and immediately realised it might win so at least I got 1 out of 2 predictions correct!). The book later became Goodreads Choice Awards Best Novel of 2020 and the NetGalley Book of 2020
My first read I had gone in assumed it was a "just" a book-club type book and was pleasantly surprised at some of the depth as well as the easy choices the author evaded. The fact the Booker judges then chose "Such a Fun Age" instead (or so it seemed) only retrospectively elevated it in my view by comparison.
Second time I had higher expectations - judging it against a very strong Women's Prize shortlist of which it is easily the highest seller even in the UK (I say "even in the UK" as the book is very American I think) and so felt more critical of the book but overall still impressed.
That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what captured [Stella] in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why [Kennedy] was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it. Maybe something in the girl was unsettled, a small part of her realizing that life wasn’t right. As if she’d gotten older and started touching the trees, only to find they were all cardboard sets.
The book opens in 1968, when one of a pair of identical twins returns to their home town of Mallard. (I am also an identical twin, born in 1968, our home village being dominated by a mallard pond)
The twin sisters are Desiree and Stella Vignes, Mallard is a Louisiana town with something of a mythical nature (although based on a town remembered by the author’s mother). Mallard was founded in the mid 19th Century by the ex-slave son of a slaveowner, who himself marries a mulatto and decides to build somewhere for “men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes” and who imagines a town where successive generations are “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro. Each generation lighter than the one before.”
Desiree and Stella are descended from the founder, by their mother: their father, son of a lower class family dies young like his three brothers – although in his case but a two stage lynching by a group of white men – the first witnessed by the twins as children (the second, fatal one, as he recovers in hospital).
At sixteen in 1954, Desiree persuades Stella to escape with her to New Orleans but there their paths diverge – as Mallard town legend has it “the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as the shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest main she could find” – the use of the separate twin trope drawing further on mythology.
Desiree trains as a fingerprint expert in Washington DC, meets a black man, has a child by him – Jude – and then when his beating of her becomes too much flees back to her hometown. There she is followed by a bounty hunter/detective hired by Jude’s father, who instead falls in love with her. Jude, struggling with acceptance given her dark colour (and the town’s policy) takes refuge in athletics and wins an athletic scholarship to UCLA where she meets, and eventually falls into a relationship with, Reece (who is transitioning) and friends with his group of part time drag queen friends.
Stella, passes as white to get a job as a secretary, marries her boss and moves with him to a prosperous Los Angeles private estate, entirely suppressing her past, a past she worries will be exposed when a black actor and his wife move opposite (despite the best efforts of the residents). Her daughter Kennedy, drops out of school and becomes a theatre actress.
An event whose improbability but not impossibility is discussed by Jude, now a statistics assistant at a college, with her students (a clever way to confront head on the coincidences which rather drive the plot), forces both generations to confront the lives (and lies) they have been living.
The book itself function on one level as an examination of “passing”, of what it says about the absurdity but also the stubbornly pernicious operation of racial hierachies. The author captured this idea in an interview:
What becomes really interesting about passing is that, on the one hand you have this character who is exposing the flimsiness of racial categories — because if you can perform whiteness then what does it mean to be white? If you can move between these categories because you decide that you will, what does it mean that we have systems that are built on reinforcing those categories? And so the passing character is really transgressive and maybe even kind of liberatory. But on the other hand, these characters who pass usually end up reinforcing the hierarchies that they are potentially destabilizing. When Stella becomes a white woman, she’s not attacking white supremacy. She actually ends up embodying white supremacy in order to maintain her role as a white woman. The tension within passing stories is between this idea of destabilizing race and then reaffirming race at the same time.
And the behavior of Stella and her respectable white neighbours (simultaneously able to claim sympathy for the ideas of Martin Luther King, and shocked at his killing, while ostracizing and then driving out the soap star’s family) – I think picks up on the author’s well known essay: https://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-what-... - and makes this a book which is about white privilege as much as anything.
Wider though this is a book which explores identity: what it means to hide yourself and your past, how can you reinvent yourself, what does it mean to become something new.
This process is much wider than Stella – although she is key to it. With: Desiree trained in identifying people by their fingerprints (which of course do vary between identical twins); her lover a bounty hunter who specialises in hunting down those who hide from their past deeds; two actors – and frequent reflection on what it means to put on a persona on stage, or as a famous TV/soap star to be seen by others as effectively the character you play; “respectable” accountants and teachers acting as drag queens; a trans man and his physical journey of transition; a rebellious teenager playing around with different music/fashion identities; a group of wives of successful husbands trying to portray the best possible impression of their lives; an estate agent changing a property to match the potential buyers and inviting them to imagine the life they may live there .... and so on – these ideas return time and time again.
Returning to the resonance between me and the book, which features identical twins, their daughters and their education - my own identical twin’s daughter’s English teacher wrote in the Guardian a review which I think captures my thoughts on this aspect very well:
Some might find this repeated allusion to the theme of pretence grinding or overly emphatic. For me, it mirrored the daily self-policing and continuous effort required in order for Stella to maintain her facade
And in addition to these themes – this is a well written book. The stand-out central mythological conceits (the town of Mallard, the twins and their different choices) are complemented by a good use of language, natural sounding dialogue, a wide-ranging plot, a host of memorable characters and a repeated refusal to take the easy option of giving the book a redemptive ending or a tidily wrapped up resolution.
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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