Monthly Archives: August 2021

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Permanent Rose, by Hilary McKay

rose

I’ve been taking refuge in YA books from the depressing ugliness of some of my adult reading. This series about the Casson family started out fun. It’s a rather madcap family where the mother, flighty Eve, is too busy painting in the garden shed to feed the children, while the father Bill lives in London where he can do his “real art” without being bothered by children underfoot.

Yes, I should have know then.

However, at first it’s rather fun. As in the best MG and YA books, the children take charge. Indigo makes hearty meals to keep Caddy’s strength up while she studies for exams and takes ridiculous driving lessons. She’s a heart-stoppingly incompetent and distracted driver but her teacher , “darling Michael”, is too enamoured to care. Saffy becomes friends with the wheelchair girl who lives nearby when they have an encounter that is half a battle and half a recognition of soulmates, before hatching a daring plan to find Saffy’s inheritance.

In the first book, Saffy’s Angel, we learned that the children are named after colors on the paint chart posted in the dining room: Cadmium is the oldest; then the boy Indigo, with the youngest being Permanent Rose who was so very impermanent at the time of her birth. Saffron, however, can’t find her name on the chart and thus learns that she is adopted.

My irritation with Bill grew, but what kept me reading was my fascination with Rose, a belligerent, truth-speaking child who is—through some trick of genes and chance—a born artist, more of an artist than either parent. She’s fierce in her passions and honesty, and utterly blunt in her exposé of the Casson family dynamics.

In this, the third book in the series, she writes letters to her father—“Darling Daddy,”—describing the desperate happenings at home, hoping that they will persuade him to come home, something that he has ceased doing since acquiring a new girlfriend. Bill, happy in his London life, spending the money he earns on trips to Paris and New York and on Samantha rather than on his cash-strapped family, chooses to believe that Rose is making things up.

She isn’t.

Indigo also pulled at my heartstrings. I have too often seen children bravely take up the slack and act as parents when their own irresponsible and self-indulgent parents prove useless. Sent to buy groceries—“Real food!” as one child demands—Eve returns with cherries and tubes of paint.

I know it’s all meant to be jolly fun and aren’t the children clever to manage on their own, but frankly, it’s all too real to me. I find it heart-breaking. Tempted to strangle Bill and smack Eve, I wanted—if nothing else—to call child services on the pair of them. They obviously “love” the children, but how empty is a declaration of love without a meal behind it or even just noticing that a child is struggling?

My only consolation is the other adults who step in to help the children with a meal or a timely helping hand. And the competence of the children themselves.

The theme of all these books seems to be that quirky families are far more interesting and wonderful than those boring families with regular meals and clothes and parental attention. For me, though, the only thing that matters in these stories is the love—as in care and attention—each child has for the other.

I learned long ago, when still very young myself, that “love is not some wonderful thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do.” As always, I learned that from a book, in this case one by Elizabeth Goudge. In these stories of the Casson family, I don’t see anything I would call love from the parents, only between the children. And that—the absence of parental love—seems to me a tragedy. No wonder Permanent Rose is so belligerent, demanding what she needs and brooking no denial.

Have you read a novel where you had mixed feelings about the characters and the theme?

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Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

klara

Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie. The AFs are apparently companions for the children in this future time: they don’t go out much and have little contact with other children except through “interaction meetings” set up by parents of other “lifted” children.

Although never defined, lifting seems to be the use of genetic engineering to increase children’s future professional and financial success. Josie’s neighbor and best friend, Rick, is unlifted and thus unlikely to be able to get into any college or university. Lifting seems to be the next step for the ambitious parents of our own time who are willing to do anything, break any law, to ensure their offspring get into a top college.

Along with our narrator Klara, we learn about Josie’s home life, the schooling she receives on her “oblong,” and the mysterious illness that threatens her life. It is Klara’s voice that makes this novel work. Befitting a machine, her tone is affectless and a little alien, yet with just enough warmth to beguile the reader.

Klara is constantly learning and adjusting based on her observations. She sees and describes the confusing emotions of the humans around her. She comes to believe that the sun is a healing god who can be approached and petitioned. One member of my book club wondered if perhaps Klara was solar-powered, which would bolster her religion.

The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

It is also a theme on the minds of many of us today as we consider the front-line workers who have had to bear the brunt of the pandemic, not just the doctors and nurses, but the workers who delivered meals and groceries and everything else to the doors of those who could afford to hole up at home.

Like so many of today’s dehumanised servers, Klara is considered a thing, an appliance. When Klara accompanies Josie to another home, the mother there asks, “ ‘Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?’ ” Klara is sometimes sent to stand alone in a closet until she is wanted. She does not seem to pass judgment on the humans around her, only to observe. On the other hand, Josie mostly treats her as a person, and even Josie’s distant mother begins to interact with Klara as she would with another person.

What does it mean to be human? Can a machine become human?

I was surprised by my book club and the reviews I read that many if not most people think that Klara is sentient. That she does experience emotion. That she loves Josie.

I’m not so sure. Klara has been programmed to do her duty as an AF which includes a dedication to Josie’s well-being. Klara goes all out to find a cure for Josie’s mysterious illness, but is that love or duty? Is there some essence of humanity that a machine can never have? One character says of human beings that there is ” ‘something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer.’ ” Is that true or wishful thinking?

These questions are complicated by the genetic tinkering that makes the lifted children into something deliberately built to specifications.

By using Klara as the narrator, Ishiguro leaves many questions open. We keep reading, hoping to understand exactly what Josie’s illness is, why her sister died, what the Cootings machine is. It is never explicit why young people need artificial companions, but here and with the other questions we ponder and perhaps come up with our own explanations.

One of the things that initially confused me is the way Klara describes what she “sees.” She talks about “partitions” which seems to be creating a two-dimensional grid before being able to recognise them as three-dimensional objects. The number of partitions increases when she is struggling (with emotion as some maintain? or with overwhelming input?). The effect is mesmerizing, as for example when a human in front of her appears in multiple partitions, each expressing a different and sometimes conflicting emotion—a brilliant way of illuminating the mix of emotions we feel at any time.

What I like most about this book, and indeed all of Ishiguro’s work, is his willingness to write about big questions. Here he explores the moral dimension of our rapidly changing world—expanding technology, environmental degradation, the ever-increasing wealth gap—in the context of our inevitable mortality and the love that may be the key to our redemption.

What novel have you read that left you pondering the big questions it explores?

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The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

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Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.” A second-grade teacher who regularly calls and visits her elderly father and irregularly sees her married lesbian friend, Nora’s early dreams of becoming a famous artist have withered to her seldom-used “studio” aka the second bedroom.

I was captivated immediately by Nora’s voice. Unlike Barbara Pym’s excellent women, Nora is open about her passions. She says her anger is “not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human.” What she’s angry about is the “hall of mirrors,” a society that is “lost in appearances” where every door that seems to lead to a more authentic life (though she wouldn’t say it that way) just leads to more mirrors.

It’s not just thwarted ambition; it’s the sense that she’s done everything right and ended up empty-handed. Influenced by her now-dead mother’s admonitions to be independent and not rely on an allowance from a husband, she postponed marriage and children to the point where it now seems too late. The idea that turning forty seems like the end to her may seem absurd, given our long and often late-blooming lives, but I know many women feel that way.

Meeting a professional artist, a successful woman on the verge of breaking out to international fame, sends Nora into unknown territory. Italian Serena Shahid has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts in this beginning of the 21st century with her husband, Lebanese Skandar, for his year-long fellowship at Harvard. When their son Reza appears in Nora’s classroom, Nora falls in love with him, and ultimately with both of his parents.

As they become friends, Serena asks Nora to share a studio with her, not only prompting Nora to take up her own art again, but also giving her the chance to be around a “real” artist at work.

I’ve heard often from writers and artists about their feelings of imposter syndrome and certainly felt it myself at the beginning of my career. If you’re not careful, the goal post of deciding you are a real writer or artist can keep moving: completing the novel, publication, achieving a certain sales number, bestseller, matching some perceived rival’s status. The only way off the hamster wheel is to accept in your heart of hearts that, as Julia Cameron says, since you create, you are an artist, whatever your medium.

Messud raises valid questions about what it means to be an artist. Does it mean, if you don’t want to simply work in obscurity, sucking up to the pretentious gatekeepers, those who schedule shows and write reviews and hang out with the “right” people? What must you sacrifice? What do you have to tell yourself?

I’m rarely angry, but I could relate to Nora. Plus the questions raised are ones I have long been interested in. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir-writing, ethical questions around creating abound. Even more, though, ever since the women’s movement of the 1970s I’ve been fascinated by the choices women make within the changing and unchanging constrictions of our society.

The writing is amazing. Nora’s voice just would not let me go as her relationship to her art, to the members of the Shahib family, to herself, all twist and turn, tangle and untangle. I’ve rarely encountered such an inhabited voice, one that leaves me feeling as though I truly know this woman. The passion in her voice is sculpted with a poet’s concision for maximum effect.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes — rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast.

Each phrase is so perfect: “deployed for domestic purposes!”

I especially relished the descriptions of the art: Serena’s Wonderland installation, Nora’s tiny boxes, each a room in a famous woman artist’s life. The ending felt a bit rushed, but satisfying. It left me speculating about what Nora would do next.

What novel have you read that cast a new light on your own experience?

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This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

happiness

At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out and stays out, it might be a miracle.

The other remarkable event on Easter Sunday is the arrival of Christy, a middle-aged man who works for “the electrics” and will be staying in Doady and Ganga’s cottage, sharing the loft with Noel. For electricity is finally coming to Faha, bringing not only light to the unsuspecting villagers, but the previously unknown modern world. And Christy has a secret agenda.

I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored. Conflict doesn’t have to be a battle or a car chase; it can grow out of miscommunication and missed connections.

Through Noe, as he’s known, we enter into the life of the village: the doctor with his three beautiful daughters, the young priest whose well-known goodness leads him keeping the church door unlocked so thieves don’t have to break in. There’s a forge rather than a hardware store and of course the farms.

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February.

There’s a lot of gentle humor here. Williams describes the eccentric villagers with compassion and often a deft turn of phrase. In such a small village people must get along, no matter how oddly their neighbors behave. Noe and Christy take to riding Doady and Ganga’s bikes around to pubs—where of course it’s only polite to have a bottle of stout or three—in search of the legendary Irish musician Junior Crehan.

But it’s the language that lays a spell on me. Writers are often advised to avoid too much dialect because it can be challenging for the reader. I once actually had to give up on a novel written in broad Glaswegian dialect after only a few pages. Instead we are advised to find a way to suggest the lilt of an accent through the music of our sentences: the choice of words and the way we arrange them.

Williams is a master at this, and rewards careful study. Every now and then he’ll throw in an Irish phrase, but mostly it is simply the music. The villagers’ memory is embedded in story, stories told over and over, that become the fabric of their share life.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor the knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

And the other part of the binding is the old songs, traditional Irish music:

Gilbert Clancy… said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

I loved being a part of this community for the space of this novel and will be looking for more of Williams’s books.

Sometimes we like novels or appreciate or even admire them. What novel have you read recently that you simply enjoyed?

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In the Memory House, by Howard Mansfield

memory

What we remember and how we remember it continue to puzzle me. Sometimes a random, quite trivial moment remains vivid decades later while critical events are somehow lost. And then, as a memoir writer, the accuracy of my memories matters to me.

Oliver Sacks said:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

I find this idea exciting and horrifying. My writing is sometimes like an archeological dig: unearthing memories followed by research to verify them as much as possible. Sometimes it is more like a circus clown’s act: pulling a handkerchief from my sleeve only to find it attached to another one, which when pulled out is attached to yet another, and so on.

But if every time I pull out a memory it is somehow changed, then I have to factor that in. Yet it is exhilarating to consider what those changes say about me and the person I’ve become, or rather, am becoming.

In this series of essays, Mansfield uses the recollections of individuals to compose a portrait of what we as a society remember, or more accurately, what we forget. From there, he considers the effects of that loss of cultural memory.

He visits small museums around New England, usually run by the local historical society, and ponders the objects donated to them: rock collections, strange antique tools, and in one a bottle of barley. Why would someone bottle up some grains of barley and present it to the historical society? Was it a particularly good harvest?

Mansfield says, “What is saved and what is discarded, who is remembered and why—all that is significant.” The who is important. In another essay he says, “In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors. We choose with monuments, markers and history books. We choose also with bulldozers, by what we remove.”

One essay describes the loss of Boston’s West End neighborhood in the late 1950s. In the name of urban renewal, the city assumed ownership of all the houses and demolished them to make way for luxury high-rises, giving the lie to their promises of mixed housing. Reimbursement, if it came, was minimal, leaving homeowners and landlords with mortgages they still had to pay. The layering of voices, remembering, summons a vision of what life must have been like before the wrecking balls came. Who decides what is destroyed?

Mansfield describes the tall trees that covered New England before the Europeans arrived. “Sailing to America, the early settlers could begin to smell pine trees 180 nautical miles from landfall.” In his brilliant book, Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessel described how the Native Americans had managed these forests to enhance hunting game and harvesting fruit and nuts. But the settlers feared the woods and cleared them for fields and, later, to send timber back to Europe. They also brought diseases that further decimated the woodlands. When trees were planted in towns in the 19th century, streets of elms and oaks and maples, another set of diseases came to wipe them out.

What enlivens these essays are the individual stories: the tale of the Cooke Elm in Keene, New Hampshire; Frederic Tudor who invented a machine to harvest ice from Walden Pond; the memories of West Enders like Joe Caruso, Richard Lourie, Barbara LoVuolo. Joseph LoPiccolo describes his grandfather, “known as the ‘mayor’ of Brighton Street” sitting outside with his cat Martha all day, greeting everyone who went by.

We have—each of us—in our lifetimes seen great changes in our culture. From our parents and grandparents, from the books we read and the songs we sing, we have memories of even older ways of life. Questioning the accuracy of those memories, which often seem transformed by nostalgia into a past that never was, may not be as important as asking why we want to remember the past that way, what our revisions say about our dreams and ideals.

What do you remember about the road you grew up on—perhaps what it looked like or an odd character who lived there or some game that you used to play?