Succumbed to a half century of forty-watt bulbs

I don't know how long I slept, because when I awoke in my solitary cell, of the many things I did not see, most conspicuously absent was a digital-clock radio. Go tell the time, in a sunless room, from shadows on the wall. For all I knew, I was Rudolf Hess rising and shining in Spandau, because if he's as crazy and subject to persecution manias as his attorneys purport, what worse thing could he wish on himself than to wake up as me? I lay in my narrow, lumpy bed, calmly aware that the thin, tufted mattress had crippled me for life. A dancer could have an airtight damage suit, but a non-professional such as myself, who simply preferred a healthy spinal column for personal reasons, had no case. I couldn't find the energy to turn my head. Had anyone, I wondered, ever been this tired? There was a recent collection of pictures in my head, vivid and meaningless. Claude throwing my bags into the rear of Charles's car. A hotel lobby ugly with paintings, hanging metal objects, and fluorescent light fixtures. A skinny, balding night clerk ignoring me and handing Claude a key. Claude unlocking a door and dumping my worldly goods on a green, blue, and yellow linoleum floor worn brown in spots.

All through the room, cracks and burns exposed an underlayer of barren brown that was spreading as though blight had struck the skimpy surfaces. A yellowish lampshade next to the bed had succumbed to a half century of forty-watt bulbs and displayed its diseased patches of brown. There was no question in my mind that whatever had afflicted the room was contagious and would get to me next.

— from After Claude, by Iris Owens.

I first heard of this book a few months ago during NYRB Reading Week. (You can read reviews at Bibiliographing, Shelf Love, and The Dewey Divas.)

It starts off with wit and self-assurance ("I left Claude, the French rat.). The Bell Jar, The Dud Avocado, Fear of Flying — it has a voice in this class of books. Feminist spirit. Self-examination.

But it didn't take long — just a few pages — to find that I didn't like Harriet the narrator) all that much. She's deluded and downright mean-spirited.

This makes for a fascinating train wreck of a read, but I have to admit I had trouble getting past my distaste for her character. I had to repeatedly remind myself that I was supposed to be enjoying this, in a jaw-dropping OMG-how-can-she-do/say/think-that kind of way, and stop getting worked up over Harriet's poor decisions. (This book is pretty much dismissed by the Guardian, where, curiously enough, it's reviewed by a man, and I can't help but feel that's a factor in their low opinion.)

Midway, the novel takes a turn for the weird and becomes a very different novel from the one it started out to be.

While the first section is spent mostly in Claude's apartment, warlike and reliving the past inside her head, the second section takes place in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, where it's all peace and love, and Harriet actually looks outside herself and finds her saviour, man. These two sections almost don't belong together.

I'm ambivalent about After Claude for lots of reasons. If you've read and enjoyed the novels of Plath, Dundy, Jong, then Owens may entertain you and will bring a 1973 complement to the lives of women depicted therein. If you've not read those other books, go read them first.

Two social documents

I recently read The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath (originally published under a pseudonym), and I have to admit, I'm a bit mystified why so many people (well, mostly anonymous-to-me online readers, grown women who read it when they were moody teenagers) think of this book so fondly.

I didn't know anything about The Bell Jar, except that it was the only novel Plath wrote. (The Biblioracle suggested it to me months ago, and I thought, huh, there's a gap in my literary education.) Talk of it never seemed to address the novel itself, but rather was steeped in the "romantic" circumstances of Plath's life and suicide.

It's often described as chronicling Esther Greenwood's descent into depression, which I think is a bit false; there is no descent into madness — the depression is always there. It's not a gradual progression, nor does it appear to be due to a particular trigger. Esther's just wired that way. And in that way, I think it's a pretty accurate portrayal of what I understand clinical depression to be. Also, the account of the experience of undergoing electroshock treatment is fascinating.

The first portion of the book tells of Esther's adventures in New York City. They're kind of crazy, not in a psychologically abnormal way, but in a wild-life-of-college-girls-let-loose-in-the-big-city way, and this is fairly comic and entertaining. The tone is quite similar to that in a couple other books I've read lately: Elaine Dundy's Dud Avocado and Rona Jaffe's Best of Everything (more on this in a bit).

And then Esther starts trying to kill herself. This is where the novel stops working for me, because I just can't connect with this character. I take this as a fairly sure sign that I don't have clinical depression, but it also makes me question how good is this novel as a novel. Forget its worth as a sociohistorical document, insight into Plath's biography, the breaking of taboos regarding mental illness, for there's no doubt the novel has great value in this regard. It just leaves me cold. And a good novel makes me feel for who peoples them, whether or not I have anything in common with them. With Esther I feel a kind of blankness (and maybe this is the point? that this depression, the suicidal ideation, is really unknowable unless you're in it?).

I'm now also seriously worried about all the young women who relate to this book. Really?

For all this, The Bell Jar is a quick (less than 200 pages) and relatively entertaining read, not depressing at all. Esther's voice is light and chatty; it's not the "poetry" I was expecting, but there are some wonderful, sometimes startling, descriptions:

That was another thing — the rest of us had starched cotton summer nighties and quilted housecoats, or maybe terry-towel robes that doubled as beachcoats, but Doreen wore these full-length nylon and lace jobs you could half see through, and dressing-gowns the colour of sin, that stuck to her by some kind of electricity. She had an interesting, slightly sweaty smell that reminded me of those scallopy leaves of sweet fern you break off and crush between your fingers for the musk of them.

There's a throwaway line in the opening pages: "last week I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with." Later, when Esther's steeped in her illness, I questioned whether I'd read that line at all, or if I'd understood it correctly, and I wonder now how much it contributes to the attitude I'd formed toward the rest of the book, that Esther will survive this, everything's going to be all right.

But as far as depicting the recklessness of the young American woman of the 1950s, The Dud Avocado (though set a few years later) conveys something more meaningful to me, with more comedy and tragedy, and in a much stronger, fresher, more distinctive voice.

The Best of Everything, by Rona Jaffe, is another fascinating sociohistorical document, much more accessible, and in my opinion, an all-round better novel.

I've only recently started watching Mad Men, and at the beginning of episode 6 (Babylon) of season 1, Don Draper is in bed with this novel as Betty is chattering about the movie adaptation and whether Joan Crawford's looks are holding up. The beauty of the ereader is such that minutes after the episode finished, I myself was reading The Best of Everything in bed. (I'd be reading Leon Uris's Exodus now too if it were available as an ebook.)

No doubt Don was reading it to complement the advice of the review in the New York Post: "Any employer reading these pages will make a mental note to check up on what the girls in his office do after lunch, and with whom."

It follows the lives of a handful of women, most of whom work in a publishing office, and offers a glimpse into the workings thereof. While it might be said to focus on their romantic adventures, it's a lot more complicated than that. Office politics, gender politics, career ambition, the pressure to marry. These women have a lot to deal with, and Jaffe dispenses a fair measure of philosophical wisdom in her commentary:

Change in a person's character structure is slow and almost imperceptible, and although many people look back and say, This was the day that changed my life, they are never wholly right. The day you choose one college instead of another, or decide not to go to college at all, the day you take one job instead of another because you cannot wait, the day you meet someone you later love — all are days that lead to change, but none of them are decisive because the choice itself is the unconscious product of days that have gone before. So when April Morrison, looking back, said, "The day of the Fabian office party in 1952 was the day that changed my life," she was wrong. The day she cut her hair because she wanted to look like Caroline Bender, the day she saw her first movie and dreamed of New York — all were days that changed her life, and if it had not been for all of them she would never have become involved with Dexter Key.

(And a tragedy that turned out to be!)

Anyway, The Best of Everything is a novel that had me up late at night and snatching coffeebreaks at work just to see what happens next. It even made me cry. It had seemed to me that the only way to close off the story would be either in utter devastation or else with an unrealistically fairy-tale finish, but Jaffe surprises in offering up a perfect ending. It's completely hopeful that a balance can be struck between career and family, and that a woman's independence, whether sexual or financial, can be asserted. Sadly, I think this novel is still very relevant today.

If you're one of the many who love The Bell Jar, I'd love to hear why! Then go read The Best of Everything.

The next item of distraction

I wanted to say a little about The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, but time is tight these last couple weeks, so I keep waiting and waiting for time enough to say what I have to say, and it turns out I really don't know what to say, and if I wait any longer there won't be anything left for me to say, all that something I'm trying to put my finger on will have vanished into thin air, so here I am settling to say just a very little.

It's charming!, delightful!, even outrageous! in its way. Groucho Marx, in a letter to Dundy, wrote, "I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you're the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)." Written in 1958, The Dud Avocado wreaks of other-era-ness, but in the best possible way. About a 21-year-old American girl living in Paris for a time (funded by her uncle), sowing her wild oats and trying to find herself. Somehow, magically, it's fresh.

The thing that stands out for me, beyond the colourful characters and funny incidents, is the voice. And I don't just mean the tone, its easy, breezy way, the way the language simply carries you off, or the mood. I'm kind of assuming these are quasi-technical terms — voice, tone, mood — and I can't pretend to know how to use them correctly. But I mean: voice! It's so strong, I can hear it in my head, I don't mean like just some random crazy voice in my head, but really hear it, and if I were any good at that sort of thing (like in the way you need a certain vocabulary to be able to describe a really nice glass of wine — see, how lame is that, "really nice"?), I could describe it, its timbre and pitch and fullness and legs, the way it cracks with occasional uncertainty and how it flirts. I mean: you can hear it! this beautiful narration, it's the most natural thing in the world.

It's a voice with a touch of Irma la Douce about it; the stories share little (although, hmm... it's been ages since I saw that movie; I mean, the plots are different, but come to think of it, you could probably spot lots of similarities, situation by situation), but anyway the spirit of Paris is similarly resonant. Also it reminds me of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, minus the psychoanalysis, and Breakfast at Tiffany's (more the film than the novella), but without quite that level of tragedy. She's a phony, but a real phony.

And she's young! and in Paris! and in love! and oh, how terribly wrong it sometimes goes! And even though you want to slap her from time to time, really, deep down, you hope everything turns out for Sally Jay.

I returned to the table black and blue, two buttons ripped off my blouse and mad as a wet hen. I confronted Larry. "Good-by," I said. "Go to hell and take this whole bunch with you. Do you know what I think? I think they should be driven into the sea with pitchforks, like a horde of great crab things." I gesticulated wildly, and my handbag swung out and hit something or somebody, and landed on the floor, butter-side down of course, and everything spilled out — lipstick, compact, passport, mirror. It was the Ritz all over again, except the gesture had popped the last button of my blouse as well. I stamped on the mirror in sheer temper. Then I sat down. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone, I noticed, was very polite about my outburst, which for them was merely the next item of distraction which they expected to have provided; Larry picked up my bag, put all my things back in it, handed it to me and told me to go to the Ladies Room and have the attendant sew the buttons back on my blouse, and that we'd go on as soon as I got out.

And then — oh gosh — I know all this next part by heart — I should, I've been over it so many times. And then I came out of the john and told Larry I'd lost my passport and he said, "No you haven't, here it is, I found it after you left" and he took it out of his jacket and slapped it against the palm of his hand a couple of times and asked me why on earth I carried it around with me. I said because I didn't know where to put it down. Oh Lord, just saying these words even now makes me groan with boredom, when I think how many times they've bounced off dead walls and deaf ears. Anyway, I said I didn't know where to put it down because I was always losing things, even in my hotel room, or they were losing me, rather. It's a gradual thing — I kind of slowly miss them — it's as if they're weaning themselves away from me. I've never known a fountain pen longer than a month and I'm lucky if a lipstick stays with me for three weeks. So, as I said, that was why I carried this passport around with me. Larry said, "O.K., O.K., it's none of my business," took my bag, dropped the passport in, clicked it shut, and handed it back to me. And that, as I was later to say about a hundred thousand million times, was the very last I ever saw of that passport.

I bet you want to know what happened to that passport!

Here's another little excerpt, which gives insight into the title.

This book is a bit hard to find in Canada (I believe it's a matter of rights and permissions — there's not even a Canadian price printed on the cover), but it's worth going out of your way to get your hands on a copy.

Wow, I had more to say than I thought.

Cheer up, my little avocado!

We looked at the menu. "Hah! Avocados," he said, brightening. "How I love them. Cheer up, my little avocado," he said to me pinching my hand. "You know, these American girls are just like avocados. What do you think, am I right, Max? Who ever even heard of an avocado sixty years ago? Yes, that's what we're growing nowadays." His avocado arrived and he looked at it lovingly. "The Typical American Girl," he said, addressing it. "A hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing." He began eating it. "How I love them," he murmured greedily. "So green — so eternally green." He winked at me.

"Stefan, please..."

"No, it's true. And I will tell you something really extraordinary, mes enfants. Do you know that you can take the stones of these luscious fruits, put them in water — just plain water, mind you — anywhere, any place in the world, and in three months up comes a sturdy little plant full of green leaves? That is their sturdy little souls bursting into bloom," he finished off, well satisfied with his analogy.

"Well, this one isn't going to burst into bloom, " I said morosely, putting my nose in my drink. "What you've got here is a dead one."

"A what? A dud one?"

I took my face out of the glass. "No, dead. Dead. Oh, forget it."

Max raised his glass and smiled at me. "The dud avocado," he said, proposing the toast.

— from The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy.

I raise my glass.

From there to here

I'm having a hard time carving out some time to write in any reflective kind of way. I've been back from away for days, but tired, stressed, and busy.

In particular there are two books I finished reading before leaving and want to write about. You Lost Me There, by Rosecrans Baldwin, which was wonderful in ways I didn't expect it to be, and Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, which is mindfuckingly amazing. (Stay tuned for more!)

And I finished reading The Passage (all 800+ pages!). The pacing is good, and the characters are (mostly) believable, and ohmygod postapocalyptic biofreak vampires! so it's a good summer read, or long train ride read, or stormy night read, or snowbound winter cabin read (I'm guessing). I'll definitely be reading whatever books follow this one in the series, and I'll probably even see the movie.

I saw some clip of an interview with author Justin Cronin in which he discusses the book's genesis and the tradition he sees it following, being somewhat epic adventure, like, for example, Jules Verne (or am I confusing this with the China Miéville interview I saw? or was that element common to both?), but it's got me wondering, what kind of book is this really?, it's not exactly literary, but it's a far cry "better" than many a blockbuster à la Dan Brown (but how? by what objective criteria?), and I'd like to think this book will be read and enjoyed 100 years from now, maybe not as the cream of the literary crop, and not as some obscure gem, but as something people, real people, read and enjoyed, and it's pretty good dammit, and I wonder is this, say, Dumas-calibre? I mean: an adventure story! with heroes and villains and moral ambivalence and romance!

The vampires, I'll point out, are wholly original vampires, and I shouldn't even call them that — they're referred to as "virals." They are the result of biogenetic manipulation gone wrong, and have no relation to Vlad the Impaler and myths of that ilk, barring a few superficial similarities (but virals love garlic — you can set traps with it). I think Cronin owes a lot to Anne Rice (will people read Anne Rice 100 years from now?), actually, in terms of the vampire/viral sense of "family" and their manner of connection/communication.

(Note to self, apropos of nothing: Read Stephen King's The Stand someday before I die. No, I haven't read any Stephen King.)

There was only one expedition to a bookstore while we were away (I shouldn't call it that. Really, it was an expedition to get mommy an espresso-based beverage, the site of which caffeine-proffering establishment is on the premises of a bookstore, so I had to take a gander...), and I picked up only something for the kid, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, by Alvin Schwartz, which was a big hit, in particular the story of "The Green Ribbon." Helena's reading skills are better in French than in English, so it's a coup for me, a huge relief, to find something that both involves and challenges her in a language I can more easily relate to her in.

My sister was lovely enough to bring me The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, which I've been wanting for ages, but then my daughter was careless enough (but no, it's not her fault, it's an accident of circumstance) to set a sopping wet paper towel beside it on the table on which it was resting, so the back third of it now is pretty severely warped, and this made me sad and angry, but I'm past it, it's still the same book I want to read, with all the same words, all still legible, a beautiful book, it's what's on the inside that counts.

The week (that is, the week since I've been home already) being what it was, I thought I deserved to treat myself to a book, and I specifically had in mind Beside the Sea, by Véronique Olmi, the reviews of which are overwhelmingly good (see for example, 1, 2, 3), but a little internet legwork showed I wouldn't find a copy within a reasonable radius of here, and not wanting to wait for one to be delivered, I decided, I'm smart enough to handle this in its original language (hah!), so today I got off the metro a station early to check out the French bookstore, and now I have for my very own a slim volume containing 2 novellas: Bord de mer / Numéro six. I've read a couple pages, I get the gist, but I know I'm missing out on nuances. We'll see how it goes...