Parenthood. Discuss.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

An outstanding novel powered by what so few novels manage to achieve: authenticity. Kevin’s detractors complain that they find it impossible to believe how a mother could feel so coldly towards her son, as does Eva in this novel. But I enjoyed the book precisely because I found that so believable.

It is perfectly reasonable that most mothers love their progeny (although I would argue that few love them unconditionally, which is almost always a tautology). But within the complexity of human nature and experience, let’s face it: there will be some parents who dislike their kids, who hate them, whose paternal relationship lacks love from both sides, and who feel distraught that their crime is among society’s unmentionables. Anyone who argues that it is unnatural for a mother not to love her son misunderstands nature, which is messy and experimental and never, ever immutable.

So I found Eva to be not just believable and authentic but utterly captivating for the way she represents a phenomenon (no matter how small) that must be true but is also vilified to the point of being ignored. This is the central reason why Kevin works so brilliantly. It is truly fresh and wonderful.

But there are a great many other things right with this book. The prose is lucid and witty. The plot is tightly controlled and delicately threaded – winning the effect of gripping the reader. I was lucky enough to read the novel while on a break; if I was supposed to be working, I would have had to fudge the time sheet.

Kevin is a stunning novel with a shocking dénouement. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Perfect for a quiet night in alone

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

by Richard Yates

Richard Yates’s level of perception is so deep, and brought to the page with such grace, that even his most poignant and gloomy stories fill mewith joy. This collection of shorts is such a work. Each story in this remarkable little volume is carefully observed, each a study in loneliness. And yet Yates is able to lead the reader through them without feeling the same pain as his characters. His skill as an observer of the human condition is such that you feel connected to these sad characters, but able to sympathise from a distance at the same time. You feel like their psychiatrist: calculating a diagnosis, while understanding their character on every level.

And that does not mean that these stories come off as cold or distant. Just that Yates’s style affords you a kind of objectivity. It is not true objectivity – you still feel something for the lonely teacher who never quite hits it off with her class – but it is objective nonetheless. Yates has lifted the lid on these people’s homes so that you might look in on their lives. You can see and feel them with the professional detachment of a counsellor.

The collection is also a canny, if demographically narrow, perspective on twentieth century America, as is Yates’s Revolutionary Road. The intriguing social experiment of American modernity is portrayed with Yates’s characteristic pathos and clarity. For that alone, these stories are excellent.

Why not? There’s fun to be had in comics

Y: The Last Man

By Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra

It is somewhat ironic that a comic book in which 99% of the characters are female focuses on the sole male character. But that is the world we live in, and I give the authors of Y: The Last Man credit for inventing a very simple but enthralling scenario. The situation is this: an unknown virus has killed all mammals on Earth that carry a Y chromosome – ie, all men – except for Yorick, an American loser, and his pet monkey, Ampersand.

The ballast of great American literature

The Ballad of the Sad Café

By Carson McCullers

The first book I reviewed on this blog was The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, over two years ago. I knew I’d return to her writing some day, so I was delighted to find a copy of Sad Café for sale in a charity shop, charging 10p. It’s probably the most undervalued book I own!

What a brilliant collection of stories this is. The novella that lends its title to the entire collection is a perfect study of Miss Amelia, her hunchbacked companion Cousin Lymon and her ex-husband Marvin Macy. The novella contains some wonderful descriptions of these characters: as is true with friends in life, you feel as if you know them deeply and yet they remain enigmatic at the same time. You can’t ever know someone completely. McCullers gives us just enough of her protagonist, Miss Amelia, to understand her motivations in life. And yet the author holds something back, making Miss Amelia mysterious and unfathomable in the final analysis. It makes for an intriguing story.

As with Wedding, the stories here are filled with exquisite evocations of place and time. Sad Café occurs in a small, wood shack of a town, dusty roads, nosy residents. McCullers puts you in the middle of it – in the café itself, among the moonshine swillers and the hefty wooden furniture. The other stories are equally capable of dropping the reader into their setting, perhaps none more so than A Domestic Dilemma, in which a man confronts his wife’s alcoholism. Arguably a much crisper representation of suburban domestic horror than The Women’s Room, albeit from the husband’s perspective, this story manages to suggest that the home is no cruise ship. The husband sees his wife’s problem, tries to protect their children from it and even tries to help his wife. And yet the heartbreaking conclusion is his apparent admission that he can’t do much for her and that perhaps this is the way it is. The story is a much more nuanced way to address the domestic question than The Women’s Room. It is not combative from the outside; it merely shows from the inside of these characters how awful the social structure of marriage and family can be.

Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland is a brilliant title, and the story contained within it just as good. The tale is a brief exploration of one simple observation: that some people lie for the sake of lying. We all know someone who does this and, while McCullers can’t answer why people do it, she outlines its effect on those around them. Enlightening observational stuff, McCullers. Will it be another two years before I find you again?

Originality squared

Slaughterhouse 5

By Kurt Vonnegut

Every so often you come across a novel that is so dazzling in its originality and imagination that it leaves you breathless. Slaughterhouse 5 is one such novel. Its uniqueness comes not in the way its characters behave or what they say or where they live. Any writer who tries too hard on creating new modes for these elements is going to forget how to tell a story. No, in this novel, Vonnegut’s originality is much more insidious. It’s the way that Vonnegut sat down one day and said to himself, ‘I’ll write a book about the bombing of Dresden and about a man who is kidnapped by aliens with no concept of time, and it will show the horror and futility of war.’

Now, that’s a man after my own heart. There’s the originality. It’s not imaginative to call your aliens ‘Tralfamadorians’; anyone can make up silly names for alien races. It’s not even imaginative to kidnap a human and display him on a distant planet as a kind of zoological specimen; anyone could probably think that up – and I’m sure hundreds of sci-fi writers have done just that. No, Vonnegut’s imagination is much broader: in less than 300 pages, he tears apart several genres and even changes the concept of the novel.

It is a great thrill to read such a book, because it is so different from all your other experiences of reading books. And yet it is grounded in some very real facts – the bombing of Dresden being the main one. The beauty of centring a story about one such awful event is that it becomes relentless and unavoidable. You know Dresden is destroyed and that it’s a bad thing, and so the build-ups to it, connected through our protagonist’s time travelling-alien-adventure plot, become more and more devastating. Moreover, it allows Vonnegut to retain his focus and not to be concerned with every other horrible war. He doesn’t need to do that. Dresden is bad enough. Focusing on that is almost as brave as writing a novel that the booksellers won’t know how to categorise. This book is great fun and a real thrill.

Dump it

The Women’s Room

By Marilyn French

I couldn’t finish this book, but I count it as an achievement that I made it over half way. By one page. So I won’t waste too much time by outlining why and how I didn’t like it, in case you think that my opinions are half-formed

The simple fact is that this is not a novel. It is a slurry of case studies, jammed together and fictionalised. Even literary novels must have plot, Marilyn, just plot driven by emotion. Here we have plenty of emotion, shoved down our throats like we don’t have enough emotion ourselves, but little or no development. French pulls together all the awful stories of women’s oppression imaginable in Western society and fails to edit them. You end up with (half) a book of testimonies, essentially. Maybe this book therefore had a lot of value in 1977, and maybe it does if you’re reading fem lit from a historical perspective. But in 2011, there’s nothing here. Read a proper story instead.

Wonder words

Wonder Boys

By Michael Chabon

Loving a book and then watching the film adaptation is like setting yourself up for a fall, isn’t it? So why not do it the other way round? I love Curtis Hanson’s movie Wonder Boys, and have done since the first time I saw it years ago. I sprung it on a group of friends, all of whom hated it. But I didn’t give up, and have watched it once a year or so ever since.

I always knew I wanted to read the novel on which it is based. Wonder Boys is, after all, a story about novels, writers and stories. Delving only deeper into this narrative, in the way it was originally conceived could only be a good thing. And indeed it is. Michael Chabon’s excellent novel is a sort-of literary screwball comedy. Where American Pie is dumb and dirty, Wonder Boys is dumb and dirty, but with a kind of grace. Chabon manages to drive forward his lumbering plot with pace and wit – and plenty of teasing. The story follows a creative writing professor and novelist, dreading the visit of his editor because his new novel simply isn’t ready. In fact, it’s sprawled into a 2,000-page mess. The editor arrives on the weekend of a literary festival, during which our hero becomes embroiled in all sorts of mischief along with his editor, two students, his in-laws, his lover and her husband.

The novel is perfectly conceived: taking place over one hectic weekend, it is exciting; that the weekend in question is when many things fall into and out of place for our hero is the real treat. We see a man demolished, systematically, by others but mostly by himself. We love him throughout and certainly, as he realises his folly and slips into emotional humility, at the end. This is a perfect novel.

Smokin’

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

In planning this pessimistic view of the future, Bradbury stripped back all the politics that could have bogged him down and focused only on their effects. The story follows a fireman’s revolt against his role of book burner, in a society where books are banned and proper discussion avoided. And it is these strange, but altogether believable, societal characteristics on which Bradbury focuses. That’s the beauty of this fascinating little novel.

Compared to 1984 and Brave New World, there are no proper politics in this book – and what a virtue! There are no fascists (really), no tyrants, no Big Brother, no Ministry of Truth. There are just the workers charged with enforcing these bizarre laws and a few members of the public, some of whom dissent and some of whom cannot step outside of the hegemony. I can only imagine Bradbury’s temptation to go into detail about how and why this society came to be this way, or about the power at play and the individuals in charge. But he avoids them all, and it is the secret of this novel’s success. The fact that tyrants have appeared, won and lost over and over again means that there’s little point in Bradbury inventing new ones for his dystopian vision. We know enough about past horrors to be perfectly able to fill in the gaps in Fahrenheit 451 and guess enough about the forms of politics. So they’re not necessary.

Instead, Bradbury rightfully centres his novel on one man, caught up in this awful hegemony, his role within it and the existence of his own freewill. The novel is 172 pages long; no more are necessary. In that short time, Bradbury takes us on an exciting journey – and one I’ll never forget.

So real you can smell the blood

In Cold Blood
By Truman Capote

In Cold Blood is an extraordinary book. Friends of literature know its claim to fame – journalism with a novelist’s approach – but the experience of reading it is much more profound than a simple tagline. In bringing together the two worlds of reportage and fiction, Capote is clearly a talented interviewer, researcher and writer. Most of us are blessed if we can succeed in just one of those roles.

The book tells the story of how two young men robbed and murdered a family in a small American town in 1959. In my opinion, Capote’s account is so compelling for focusing on two areas: the shockwaves sent through the community by this awful event, and the psychological profiles of the two killers. Let’s take the first focus. The voices of the community are one of the most memorable aspects of this book, whether it’s the hard line taken by the postmistress or the devastation of the victims’ friends. You can hear these characters as real people. Indeed they are so well drawn that you hit a paradox: they are as well characterised as a novel’s protagonists, which the writer has invented and spent time bending to his will – and yet these are flesh-and-blood people who did indeed live through the nightmare that struck this small community. Capote, then, has a talent for conducting a great interview and then capturing it within his text.

Now let’s turn to his portrayal of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote’s masterstroke is his decision not to reveal their motive early on. By doing so, he creates tension and chills. The killers are characterised so perfectly that you feel what they feel, even to the extent of being able to understand how they could come to commit such an awful crime. Capote delves into their respective histories and uses them to craft a chilling portrayal of the pair of them. Their statements – reproduced at length towards the end of the book – are compelling. It’s like reading a detective’s files. In fact, it’s better: it’s like interviewing murder suspects yourself and hearing their ghastly admissions.

One criticism of the book is that Capote fails to convey the killers’ long wait to execution. His attempt includes telling the stories of a few other death-row inmates, but this detracts from the tight story he has told until that point. I can understand why he might want to stretch out the close, as it happened in real life, but he doesn’t quite achieve what I suspect he wanted to. But that is a minor blot on an exquisite canvas. I suspect that In Cold Blood will remain an important book for some time.

She’s right, but I wouldn’t have guessed it

Fat is a Feminist Issue
By Susie Orbach

Although I’ve never intentionally hurt or offended a person for being overweight, I have judged them. My knowledge of why people are overweight extended only to diet and activity level. Through this book, Orbach has told me that those two reasons are the tip of a very large iceberg. The third, much more significant reason for obesity is psychology – psychology influenced by the culture and society in which the victim has lived. Because women are in many ways handcuffed by culture and society, Orbach shows, their weight problems are a feminist issue.

After having read the book, that seems so much like common sense to me. Beforehand, I knew that our culture expected women to look and behave a certain way. And I probably would have concluded that this could lead to weight problems. But I figured that, ultimately, every person knows what constitutes a sensible, ordered diet and an appropriate level of physical activity – and that if they did not adhere to these principles then they were to blame if they found themselves overweight. How awful I now realise that position to be. It is not just judgmental; it is ignorant.

So thanks to Orbach for making in roads into my ignorance with this fine book. She manages to write both a feminist polemic and a self-help book on the same pages. When you think about how many authors struggle to do just one of those things effectively, you begin to realise the extent of her achievement. One strategy Orbach employs here is to bring in the experiences of members of the various groups she has run: she re-tells the stories of women with eating disorders, opening my eyes to the great spectrum of experiences of these victims, and provides her own psychological analysis at the same time. It’s a very competent way of revealing the problem while simultaneously ensuring that her reader understands it.

There are a few problems with Orbach’s grammar – she doesn’t seem to use enough commas – and some of the analysis is looking very dated (it was originally published in 1978). That said, we still clearly have a weight problem in the world. I believe Orbach’s book to be effective, because it has given me an insight into this problem. But what of all the victims still out there?