Monthly Archives: November 2022

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The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble

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In her seventies, Francesca Stubbs likes being busy and likes driving. When tailgated, she chooses the accelerator rather than the brake, which pretty much describes her philosophy of life.

Her job inspecting care homes for the elderly keeps her crisscrossing the country when she’s not at home in London. “England is now her last love. She wants to see it all before she dies. She won’t be able to do that, but she’ll do her best.”

The nearness of death is ever-present in this 2016 novel. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, from ‘The Ship of Death’ by D.H. Lawrence: “Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.”

There is actual flooding as well, in the Somerset Levels where she gets stuck going to a care home in February. The Canary Islands, where her newly widowed son visits an elderly writer and his young partner, is also threatened with floods from the minor earthquakes.

The novel moves between Francesca, her son, the couple in the Canaries, her elderly friends in various states of health, and several others, moving in an organic way that feels similar to following threads on the internet, reflecting Francesca’s inability to focus.

To the surprise of her friends and grown children, she’s chosen a flat in a high rise in a dodgy part of town because she likes the view. They are also surprised that she spends considerable thought and time making and delivering meals to her invalid ex-husband, a retired surgeon happy to consume prescription drugs, drink wine, and listen to Maria Callas all day.

Still, this exploration of aging is anchored by Francesca as she meets with the residents of various care homes, worries about her children, and visits her friends with whom she can laugh about the past and complain about the obituaries of other friends.

Her wry, self-deprecating sense of humor keeps the story from becoming too dark. For example, she sometimes “exercises herself by trying to recall the passionate and ridiculous emotions of her youth and her middle age, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” More often she recognises that “she doesn’t need to worry about bloodstains on the skirt, though she worries now about the soup stains on her cardigan, the egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel.”

Drabble’s masterful use of the omniscient point of view complements the story. Most novels these days use first person or close third point of view, with lots of dialogue, jump cuts, and action. Here, even scenes are narrated, evoking a slightly old-fashioned air. Yet they crackle with wit and insight as we begin to appreciate the web of associates and associations that make up a life, past and present. I found myself setting aside my to-do list in order to stay immersed in this story.

Do you have a favorite Margaret Drabble novel? Have you read a good novel about aging?

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Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

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“The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

Thus begins Kingsolver’s ninth novel, set in 2016. Willa Knox and her husband Iano recently inherited the house in Vineland, New Jersey from her aunt and were glad to get it. Not long before, in their fifties, they had been enjoying the rewards of lives spent building their careers and launching their children. Then the magazine Willa wrote for folded, forcing her to go freelance, and the college where Iano had tenure closed, obliging them to give up their house in Virginia.

Iano has managed to get a teaching job nearby, though it is only as an adjunct. Willa had thought they might just make a go of it, even if barely scraping by. Now it turns out that part of this house was built directly on the ground, with no foundation, and the whole thing is starting to tear itself apart: zigzagging cracks in the brickwork, leaks in the roof, ruptures in the ductwork.

It’s not just the two of them either. Iano’s bedbound father Nick, in his nineties and vociferously right-wing, lives with them, as does their daughter Tig, who has turned up after traveling from one organizing project to another since dropping out of college in 2012 to join Occupy Wall Street. Her barista income and Iano’s adjunct salary add up to a pitiful sum.

Then their daughter-in-law dies, and their grieving son leaves the newborn with Willa and Iano while he goes back to Boston to try and revive his startup. As they struggle with the Byzantine medical system and the demented gig economy, Willa and Iano still can’t get over the shock of having followed all the rules only to find themselves in this fix.

But that’s only half the story. In alternating chapters, another story plays out, set in the same block 145 years earlier. Thatcher Greenwood has reclaimed his wife’s childhood home in Vineland, a utopian community founded in the 19th century by Charles Landis. Fueled by his bombastic promises, it has grown and is now run by him as a fiefdom. Thatcher has started teaching science at a local school where his attempts to explain the new science of Darwin, John Stevens Henslow, John Herschel, etc. are stymied by the anti-science Christian principal, putting Thatcher’s job at risk.

His wife Rose and her mother are thrilled to be back in the house her father built—without the help of an architect, so it too is falling down. The two women, though, are only concerned with spending money and reclaiming their status symbols. Thatcher finds someone with a similar outlook to his in Rose’s younger sister, but all too soon the girl is imprisoned in corsets and tea parties.

It is their next-door neighbor, Mary Treat, who becomes his intellectual companion. Treat, a real person as is Landis, is a scientist investigating plants, insects and birds. She maintains a correspondence with Darwin and other scientists and is highly respected by them.

The two stories echo each other in obvious and subtle ways. Both Willa and Thatcher are struggling with a multigenerational family, a precarious income and a collapsing house.

For both of them, the house becomes a metaphor for the social turmoil of their time, when people’s assumptions and expectations about life, including their understanding of natural and economic laws, are being shaken. Demagogical leaders dupe a gullible populace with false promises. As Mary Treat says, “‘When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.’” In both timeframes, we find clashing convictions about religion, science and the natural world.

The book also looks at the ongoing tension, especially in the U.S., between self-sufficiency and interdependence. Both the widowed Mary Treat and Willa are struggling to find ways to survive financially. Nick refuses to accept government help, so Willa has to work around him to get help from Medicaid. Willa is also trying to find a government grant to restore their home, while daughter Tig befriends people in the neighborhood. Rose and her mother draw their validation from their social circle, while Thatcher is up against the community’s rejection of science in favor of a religion that gives man sovereignty over nature.

How we write about social issues in fiction is a common debate among writers and readers. Kingsolver herself has said that she tries to make issues accessible in stories that appeal to a general audience. However, a lot of readers find this book didactic and heavy-handed, even when they agree with Kingsolver’s politics and concerns. I agree that editing some of the more obvious lectures would have made this a better book, but the stories kept me reading to the end.

I appreciated the love between Iano and Willa, the way they supported each other, their tender memories, and physical encounters. There’s some of that in Thatcher and Rose’s marriage, but more interesting to me in that story was his intellectual friendship with Mary Treat.

And I loved Tig. She faces up to the climate emergency and is committed to making do. She says, “‘All the rules have changed and it’s hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.’” Much of her success (and the family’s) is due to her connecting to the local community, embodied in the Puerto Rican families living next door. I especially love that despite her fury at her brother’s devotion to capitalism, she is the one who is able to deal in a loving way with Nick and all his racist ravings.

Shelter is such a profound concept. There’s more to it than housing or Rose’s sheltered upbringing. All of us seek it, perhaps in faith, perhaps in science, perhaps in nationalism or our tribe. When the foundation of our society is threatened, we need to think carefully about what to tear down and what to rebuild.

Have you read any of Kingsolver’s books? What do you think about her exploration of social issues in fiction?

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Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick

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While I love a realist novel that pulls me right into someone else’s life, like Stoner by John Williams or Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, I also like to be surprised and challenged sometimes.

Here a woman named Elizabeth, in a story written by an Elizabeth, summons her past: “If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. . . Perhaps.” What arrives is a kaleidoscope of people she’s known, places she’s lived, literary references, letters, brief essays: vignettes presented in prose as concise and brilliant as poetry, connected by threads so fine as to be invisible.

Elizabeth writes about her mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was.” She writes about friends, such as Alex who has never quite fulfilled his promise—“Not quite liking himself, he whom everyone adores”—or Louisa who “spends the entire day in a blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it appears to be, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or the coldness of salt water.” And Billie Holliday with her “ruthless talent and the opulent devastation.”

I was most interested in the parts about two women who once worked for her: Ida when Elizabeth lived in Maine, and Josette when she lived in Boston, summoning the shape of their lives in spare sentences. Josette, who “in her passionate neatness, adored small spaces” finds her dream home in a trailer. In Maine, Ida is the “rough and peculiar laundress” whose “disaster” is the disreputable local man who moves in with her:

Winter came down upon them. The suicide season arrived early. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor. The little houses on the road . . . trembling there in the whiteness, might be settlements waiting for a doom that would come over them silently in the night.

This passage takes me back to my first winters in New England, fifty years ago now, when winters were more severe. Or at least that’s how I remember them. I have mixed feelings about her portraits of certain women. Anything that reduces individuals to categories rubs me the wrong way, yet the descriptions themselves are piercing.

I like to remember the patience of old spinsters, some that looked like sea captains with their clear blue eyes, hair of soft, snowy whiteness, dazzling cheerfulness. Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.

Like Elizabeth, we find roots of our identity in the people we’ve encountered during our lives and in places. She writes of the Kentucky of her childhood and sojourns in Amsterdam. But it is New York City that is most vividly rendered here.

The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again.

Originally published in 1979 as a novel, Hardwick’s plotless book is now considered an early work of what is now called autofiction where the lines between autobiography and fiction are blurred by writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Knausgård and Ben Lerner.

Readers prospecting for details of her life may find fragments in their sieves: “I was then a ‘we.’ He is teasing, smiling, drinking gin after a long, day’s work . . .” The absence of the narcissistic ex-husband who co-opted her life is refreshing.

I mistrust autofiction, though I do recognise that we create our lives and curate our memories of them. I appreciate, particularly in these days of flagrant misinformation, the attempt to tell the truth.

Still, I enjoyed this fragmented chronicle of a life. Partly it’s the writing, and partly it is honoring the collection of seemingly random memories. Many of us, as the decades pile up behind us, look back and try to find coherence in the jumbled chaos of our days. Like Elizabeth we are:

Looking for the fosselized, for something—persons and places thick and encrusted with final shape; instead there are many, many minnows, wildly swimming, trembling, vigilant to escape the net.

Have you read anything by Hardwick, either her essays or novels?

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Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy

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“At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” Thus begins this short, sharp novel by Jaeggy, an award-winning Swiss author who writes in Italian. Appenzell is a canton in Switzerland.

I thought of other novels I’d read set in boarding schools, but realised this was going to something altogether different when I read the next sentence: “This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college.”

Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer, an early Modernist admired by Kafka and Hesse, whose plotless stories convey the somber gravity of life. In one story he says, “Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”

Our narrator is enclosed by the strictures of boarding school life, having been in one or another since she was eight and her grandmother sent her away for being too wild, too savage. Her parents are separated, her mother in Brazil writes only to the headmistress giving orders such as that she is to have a German roommate. Her father, cold & distant, lives in hotel rooms, visiting her rarely.

This unwanted girl becomes fascinated by a new student: the silent and aloof Frédérique. She mounts a campaign to “conquer” Frédérique and force her into friendship. The violence of the narrator’s feelings contrasts with the strict controls imposed by the school—“Obedience and discipline set the tempo at the Bausler Institut”—and with Frédérique’s own outsized love of order.

As part of her campaign, the narrator pretends to be interested in Expressionist art and French literature, but confides to us “I postponed any serious thinking until I was out in the world.” This was exactly what a woman told me in a class I taught in a prison. It made sense to me then and makes sense to me now reading about this young woman who is desperate to break free and live her own life.

You must always say thank you, even when they have refused you something. Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile. There is a mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique, In the one the girl runs about and laughs, and in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.

The style of the book challenges today’s common writing advice to write in scenes, to show not tell. There are no scenes here, yet the narrator’s telling is irresistible. It is her voice, her feelings, and her judgments that carry the story.

The narrator’s ferocity and emotional swings can be unnerving, such as one minute wanting to literally strangle her roommate and the next laughing with her in their shared washroom. The austere beauty of the prose and the free association of the narrator’s thoughts make this a startling read.

Can you recommend a novel by a Swiss author?