Tag: USA

The Black God’s Drums (2018): P. Djèlí Clark

Leave a comment

★★★★

You know the most annoying thing about reading on a Kindle? You have no idea of how long your book is, or where you’ve got to. Imagine the scene: I’m thoroughly absorbed in P. Djèlí Clark’s atmospheric tale of sky pirates and steampunk in an alternate-universe New Orleans. The initial action has rounded off nicely, and I’m savouring the (surely) imminent start of the plot… when, suddenly, boom. The end! What I’d thought was a novel turned out to be a novella, a mere 114 pages; and what I thought was the first act turned out, in fact, to be the whole. I actually felt bereft: I wanted to know so much more about the characters – the streetwise urchin Jacqueline and the dashing pirate captain Ann-Marie St. Augustine – but it looks as though this is it, for now. My disappointment, I stress, was simply due to the book’s abbreviated length. Clark’s evocative story shows how quickly an accomplished author can draw you into their world, with intriguing characters backed up by a glorious narrative voice, full of bayou rhythms and Yoruba folklore.

Continue reading →

The Snake Pit (1946): Mary Jane Ward

2 Comments

★★★★

Virginia Cunningham finds herself sitting in a garden, while a strange man asks her about voices. She doesn’t quite understand how she came to be here. Has she gone out for a walk? Why, then, isn’t she dressed more smartly? Where is her husband Robert? Presently, another stranger called Grace urges Virginia to follow her, gently rebuking her for always forgetting how things work. Gradually, Virginia begins to understand that she is in a psychiatric hospital; but how long has she been here? Why can’t she remember anything before today? And what must she do in order to be released from this place, with its arbitrary and bewildering rules? Mary Jane Ward’s novel, of which this is a 75th anniversary edition, was inspired by her own experiences of institutionalisation, and played a major role in starting conversations about the treatment of mental illness in the USA. Poignant, compassionate, and often surprisingly amusing, it offers a frank picture of a world in which patients and staff often seem equally incomprehensible and irrational.

Continue reading →

Akin (2019): Emma Donoghue

Leave a comment

★★★½

When those we love are gone, how do we find out who they really were? Retired scientist Noah Selvaggio has decided to celebrate his eightieth birthday with a trip to Nice, the hometown that he last saw at the age of four, when his mother saw him off on a ship to America. He imagines a comfortable holiday full of good food, art and beautiful views, but his plans are rattled by two intrusions into his orderly life. The first is a pack of strange photographs found among his late sister’s papers: an apparently inconsequential group of images taken by his mother in Nice before she followed Noah and his father to America. What do they mean? And the second intrusion? The arrival of eleven-year-old Michael, Noah’s suspicious and isolated great-nephew, for whom he must act as temporary guardian. This is, at least partly, a heart-warming tale of two people learning to connect, but it’s also a story about connections to the past and how, with only a few shifts of focus, the same pieces of evidence can come to mean very different things.

Continue reading →

The 19th Wife (2008): David Ebershoff

9 Comments

★★★★

I first read this book several years ago, before I started this blog, and although I remember enjoying it immensely, I couldn’t remember the details. It’s Ebershoff’s third novel and focuses on the practice of polygamy in the Mormon church by interweaving the stories of two women, separated by more than a century. One is Ann Eliza Young, the apostate former (nineteenth) wife of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young. Her lectures and writings, represented here by a fictional autobiography, helped to expose the reality of plural marriage and, ultimately, to abolish it in mainstream Mormon faith. In the present day, we meet BeckyLyn Scott, a member of a breakaway fundamentalist sect which preserves the practice of polygamy. BeckyLyn’s husband has been shot dead in his basement den and she, his nineteenth wife, has been arrested for murder. Her son Jordan, expelled from the community as a teenager, comes to believe that BeckyLyn is innocent; but how can he prove it? The stories of these two women intertwine in an absorbing tale of plural marriage, faith and family. To make matters even more interesting, events since the book’s publication have focused international attention on the community that must surely have inspired Ebershoff’s fictional Mesadale.

Continue reading →

The Amateur Marriage (2004): Anne Tyler

Leave a comment

★★★½

It’s December 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbor has galvanised the USA into action. As excitement fizzes on St Cassian St, a Polish neighbourhood in Baltimore, the young shopkeeper Michael Anton unexpectedly meets Pauline Barclay. This vivacious young woman in a red coat captures his heart immediately. Her wide-eyed admiration convinces him to sign up, alongside the other neighbourhood boys, leaving behind his widowed mother and heading into the world. When he returns, he and Pauline marry, with all the impulsiveness that has characterised their fledgling relationship. Marriage is what you do, after all, as a young couple in times of war. This novel follows the consequences of their decision across fifty years of challenge and change, both at home and in wider society. The ramifications of their hasty, imperfect match ripple out not only through their own lives but into those of their children and friends. It’s a moving, completely convincing tale of everyday life, teasing out its little joys and sorrows, and showing that, even in the face of great events, it’s the small dramas which shape our lives most powerfully.

Continue reading →

The Made-Up Man (2019): Joseph Scapellato

8 Comments

★★★

It has been much too long, hasn’t it? It wasn’t meant to be this way: when the lockdown started in London, back in March, I thought this would be the perfect time for reading and blogging. Yes, I thought I’d finally get round to ploughing through Proust. Instead, I’ve spent seven months in a one-bedroom room flat (save a few days here and there), on furlough, with a steadily dwindling sense of purpose and intellectual capacity. It turns out that, when you have nothing to do, it becomes increasingly hard to do anything at all. And I was one of the lucky ones: having my partner here with me has been a joy throughout. But it has still been immensely hard. This is the longest gap in my blogging since I started writing The Idle Woman in 2011 and I’m sorry for that. I even forgot the blog’s birthday back in July! But things are, hopefully, on the mend now. I’m returning to work in just over a week, and am looking forward to honing my mind again because, quite frankly, it feels like unformed putty at the moment. And I need to write. I’ve been genuinely lost without this blog over the last few months. Feeling unable to focus on reading, unable to write a blog post, has deprived me of some of the most joyous hobbies in my life. Writing this blog brings me contentment, discipline and, crucially at the moment, contact with you lovely people out there in the ether. In an ideal world, I’d be taking up the reins again with a post about a staggeringly brilliant book (for which, see Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi). I have more complex feelings about The Made-Up Man, but come along with me and we’ll see if we can thrash out an opinion about it somewhere on the way.

Continue reading →

Edith’s Diary (1977): Patricia Highsmith

Leave a comment

★★★

We are all familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator in fiction. But how much greater is that unreliability, how much greater the pinch of salt or the necessary adjustment, when we read someone’s diary! Many of us will have kept diaries, in our teens if not for longer. Looking back on them provides us with an opportunity to reassess the self-delusions of someone who is no longer the same ‘us’ are we are now. To read old diaries is to engage in a constant process of negotiation with a past self. Diaries give us the chance to tell our own stories: to present the world as we know it, with ourselves as the central characters, and everyone else swirling around us in secondary roles. We are unreliable, not through intention or malice, but through simple solipsism. Edith, the protagonist of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, also keeps a diary. It was given to her as a gift when she was young and idealistic, starting out on a life that she felt sure would be full of success. But increasingly, as we follow Edith through her life, that diary becomes a reminder of life’s unpleasant tendency not to fit in with nice, neat expectations. The appropriate narrative arc never quite seems to arise in real life. Family members, somehow, never quite fulfil the expectations we have of them. More and more, Edith finds herself having to correct the shortcomings of real life in her diary, an imagined world of perfection which could all too easily become more real than her own imperfect life.

Continue reading →

American Midnight (2019): Laird Hunt

1 Comment

★★★★

Sunny afternoons in May might not be the most obvious time to read ghost stories, but Pushkin Press’s new collection of eerie American tales are enough to send a chill up the spine no matter what the time of year. Selected and edited by Laird Hunt, these classic stories span the 19th and 20th centuries, and their settings include barricaded castles; modest lodging houses; wooded roads; aesthetic Parisian apartments; forest glades; and supposedly comfortable country houses. The general trend is to unsettle rather than terrify, for which I was grateful, because my overactive imagination really doesn’t need any encouragement in the dark reaches of the night. Including works by Edgar Alan Poe, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, this is likely to include a couple of tales you’re already familiar with, but will introduce you to at least a few new friends, ready to raise the goosebumps on your arms…

Continue reading →

A Different Drummer (1962): William Melvin Kelley

Leave a comment

William Melvin Kelley. Photo used upon publication of his first book “A Different Drummer.”

★★★★

Hailed as a rediscovered classic, this 1962 debut novel examines the complexities of race relations in the American South, through the story of one extraordinary day. It’s a Thursday when the men who congregate on Mister Thomason’s shop porch see the salt wagon going by, up to Tucker Caliban’s farm. When they follow, they witness an unbelievable sight. Tucker, an African-American man who has only recently purchased his own land and built a house, methodically sows his entire acreage with salt, before destroying his livestock and setting the house on fire. He and his heavily pregnant wife leave without a word. In the days that follow, word spreads to the other African-American residents of the state and, one by one, they too pack up and leave. Kelley’s novel traces the roots of this event back through the history of the Caliban family and that of their employers and former owners, the Willsons. A blistering picture of a still-segregated South, it’s a sobering book – but one which proudly looks ahead to change.

Continue reading →

Where the Crawdads Sing (2018): Delia Owens

3 Comments

★★★★

Way out on the marshes, where the water meets the sky, a young girl grows to womanhood alone. Kya Clark has grown used to people abandoning her: first her mother left, then her beloved brother Jodie, and finally her abusive, drunken father failed to come home. It seems safer to place her trust in nature, which lives by simple rules without the duplicity of mankind. The family’s ramshackle home lies only a few miles from the little town of Barkley Cove on the North Carolina coast, but Kya might as well inhabit another world. Everyone in town knows that the marsh-dwellers are outcasts, law-breakers and thieves. When the body of popular local boy Chase Andrews is found broken and battered beneath the old fire tower just outside town in August 1969, people are quick to seek a scapegoat. And who better than the half-wild Marsh Girl? Delia Owen’s haunting novel was this month’s Book Club pick and my favourite so far (a relief, since I suggested it). It’s a paean to nature in all its rich variety, written in poetic cadences infused with Southern rhythms, and with a heroine who shatters all the stereotypes of the ‘outcast’. It’s the perfect novel for a time when, confined to homes and gardens, we finally have time to savour the natural world around us.

Continue reading →