Tag: classics

Review 2309: The Curate’s Wife

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When I reviewed E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, I remarked that I preferred Jenny’s sister Dahlia to Jenny. So, I was delighted to find that The Curate’s Wife is about Dahlia (although Jenny’s romantic fate is also involved).

Dahlia has married the curate, Cecil Sproat, on the basis of a friendship in which she feels she can say anything. But very soon, she finds that’s not true when it applies to religion, which has not formed part of her upbringing and which she finds silly. For his part, Cecil is rigid and has been unthinking in his religious beliefs. There is also the problem that Cecil is in love with Dahlia, but the reverse is not true.

Another issue is created by Mrs. Doubleday, the wife of Rector Doubleday, Cecil’s boss. She is an unpleasant woman who already dislikes Cecil and takes a strong dislike to Dahlia. She makes it her business to listen to gossip about the girls’ mother’s inferior social standing and her affair during the war. Their mother foolishly married farmer Thomas Grimshaw at the end of Jenny Wren, hoping that would remove a bar to Jenny’s marriage with Cyril Merriman, but that only made the situation more hopeless. Jenny has gone off to live with Mr. Cumming’s sisters and father and learn about the antique business.

Dahlia begins to feel as if she missed out. After school, she was first isolated on the farm and now is living with a dedicated man doing good works. She has never even been to a party or enjoyed other types of amusements. She begins to fancy herself in love with Simon Tothill, a young man she met at a theater rehearsal.

Just as Dahlia and Cecil are beginning to understand each other, Jenny arrives without warning. She has left the Cummings and expects to live with Dahlia and Cecil. Although Dahlia is happy to see Jenny, she begins to realize just how selfish her sister can be. For his part, Cecil is a little jealous of how close the sisters are.

Dahlia’s problems with Cecil have an interesting parallel in the relationship between the Doubledays. Mr. Doubleday is easy going and tries to avoid trouble but is afraid of his ill-natured wife. Their son is returning after three years of service in Africa, and Mrs. Doubleday wants him all to herself. But she soon makes a mistake in a remark that frees Mr. Doubleday from trying to please her.

This novel takes a complex look at new marriage and the lack of preparation people have for its problems. I didn’t like Jenny any better, but I have been impressed by how far below the surface Young’s novels go.

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Review 2308: One Afternoon

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One afternoon Anna Goodhart, a widow in her mid-thirties with three daughters, runs into Charlie, a young actor whom she met years ago at some event of her husband’s. He invites her to a party. She agrees to go but almost backs out. However, she goes and they soon begin an affair. Although she doesn’t expect it to last, she is wild with joy and makes no secret of their relationship.

This is the story about a woman who begins to rebuild her own life after her husband’s death, to realize things about her marriage, and to identify what she wants her life to be. Although attitudes had begun to change for women in 1974 when this book was published, it reads like a much more modern novel. I was surprised how the people in Anna’s life, with a couple of exceptions, take her affair and her subsequent decisions.

This is a lovely book filled with mostly kind people. It explores memory and how it tangles with reality as well as the complexities of love.

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Review 2305: The Fawn

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The Fawn is an unusual novel, narrated as it is by Eszter, who through the entire novel is speaking to another person. Eventually, we understand this is her lover, whose identity is not confirmed until the last half of the book.

The novel moves among scenes from the present and the past, sometimes with no transition, so that I was briefly confused about the when. Eszter grows up very poor. Her parents are from more prosperous roots, her father’s perhaps aristocratic, but his family has thrown them off. Her father is a lawyer but he takes few cases. He is more interested in horticulture and in fact is ailing for most of her life. So, her mother teaches endless piano lessons to support them, and Eszter earns money by tutoring other students and sometimes by stealing. Her life is made harder by her parents’ sufficiency for each other. She feels that they pay no attention to her.

Although Eszter becomes a famous actress with a good income and a nice flat in Budapest, she never forgets or forgives the slights of her childhood. In particular, she hates Angéla, a schoolmate who is beautiful and kind, but whose way is made easy by everyone because she is rich and beautiful. Her bad grades are corrected by the school after visits from her parents. Eszter is happy to see her family leave town after it is disgraced, but Angéla re-emerges after the war, married to the man who becomes Eszter’s lover.

Eszter is a complex character, not likable but someone who still keeps our sympathy. This novel explores the complexity of human relationships. Eszter laments that no one has ever loved her for herself, but she has turned herself into a chameleon—a famous actress who so submerges herself in her roles that on the street no one recognizes her. The Party members refuse to believe her true story when she submits her CV for approval to work at the theater, so she has to reinvent her life to make herself into a reformed aristocrat. Her lover loves her but doesn’t understand her at all.

I found this novel a little difficult at first because it just seemed to be rambling, but the narrative is compelling. Once I really got going, I just wanted to see how it ended.

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Review 2303: Alice

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Margaret admires her best friend, Alice, even from their days at school. She thinks Alice is beautiful and elegant and envies her her siblings. However, Alice’s sister Sonia disillusions Alice early by leaving home with a man and turning up at school to demand Alice give her her monthly allowance.

As the two naïve and protected girls emerge into womanhood, Margaret comes to understand that Alice is afraid of life and has no confidence in its success. After Sonia steals the boy that’s been courting Alice, she tries to commit suicide and then incautiously marries Cassius, the man who saves her, when she hardly knows him.

Although the marriage is clearly ill-advised, to Margaret Alice lives a much more exciting life than her own. Still, Margaret notices how suggestible Alice is to those giving bad advice, even people she used to avoid.

Although this novel, about young women in the upper echelons of society, works as a social satire, it also has a serious message about what happens to unprepared young women thrown into society, especially in the years between the wars, when mores where changing.

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Review 2296: Lament for Julia

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I tried to read Lament for Julia several times, but I just couldn’t do it. Taubes’s father was a psychoanalyst who believed writing is a disease and her husband disapproved of it for religious reasons, so it’s no wonder it’s quite bizarre.

Lament for Julia is a novella that takes up more than half of the NYRB edition. It is narrated by a disembodied spirit that seems to be part of and not part of a girl named Julia Klopps. Since Taubes believed that each person is a multiplicity of selves, I took it more as another self. Nothing much seemed to be happening in the novella except Julia growing up and the second self obsessing about her, but I didn’t really find any of it interesting. The writing is beautiful, and the second self’s obsessions are akin to those of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. But while I found that novel fascinating, I found the novella too sexualized, too perverse, too Freudian, and too interested in dreams for my taste.

I tried reading some of the short stories, but “The Patient,” about a mental patient who lacks an identity, is told by her psychotherapist that her name is Judy Kopitz, and we seemed to be in for a rehash of Lament for Julia.

The next one was “The Sharks,” about a boy who keeps dreaming he is being eaten by sharks. (Julia also dreams of being eaten.) Nope, couldn’t do it.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2291: Stories for Winter and Nights by the Fire

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Here’s an appropriate book for the first day of the new year!

Stories for Winter is British Library Women Writers’ seasonal collection of 14 stories set in winter. They are arranged chronologically (sort of), starting with a story from 1902 by Edith Wharton and ending with one by Angela Carter for which a date is not given but may have been published in 1974. Most of them deal in some way with changes to society that affect women.

In “The Reckoning” (1902) by Edith Wharton, Mrs. Clement Westall has noticed a disturbing change in her husband’s behavior. He has begun lecturing on his radical views of marriage—views the couple agreed on when they married—when before he preferred not to discuss them. The problem is that Jula no longer thinks the same way—that if one of a couple finds they no longer are happy together, they should part.

In “My Fellow Travellers” (1906) by Mary Angela Dickens, Miss Lanyon tells a girl a story about why she believes in spiritual things. This story fits right into the Christmas tradition begun by Dickens’s grandfather, Charles.

In “The Woman Who Was So Tired” (1906) by Elizabeth Banks, “the little reporter” writes an article about a poor woman supporting a large family and then becomes embarrassed when it becomes very popular. Her boss thinks she made the situation up, but that’s not exactly what’s going on.

In “A Cup of Tea” (1923) by Katherine Mansfield, Rosemary Fell thinks she’s doing a charitable act by inviting a poor woman to tea. But she soon decides she’s made a mistake, highlighting the divide between rich and poor.

In “A Motor” (1922) by Elizabeth Bibesco, Eve spots her ex-lover’s car on the street and knows he is visiting his current lover.

In “Ann Lee’s” (1926) by Elizabeth Bowen, two women visit an expensive hat store only to have a slightly disreputable man insistently interrupt their shopping.

I couldn’t really get on the same wavelength with Elizabeth in “The Snowstorm” (1935) by Violet M. McDonald. A stranger talks her into a dubious adventure even though she has only met him once and found him irritating. I couldn’t really understand what he wanted to confide in her or why he wanted to handle it the way he did or why she even agreed to go, much less what happens afterward.

“November Four/Ffair Goeaf” (1937) by Kate Roberts follows a group of Welsh workers to town for the fair, and two women also try to buy a hat, with less success than the women in “Ann Lee’s.”

“My Life with R. H. Macy” (1941) shows a different side of New York than Wharton’s story—a satiric look at Shirley Jackson’s brief employment at Macys, where the workers are so degraded that they’re known by their employee numbers rather than their names.

“The Cold” (1945) by Sylvia Townsend Warner shows how different the staff who are ill are treated from the family.

As Simon Thomas points out in the Introduction, tea is very important to the British, and it is the offer of a cup of tea that begins an acquaintance in “The Prisoner” (1947) by Elizabeth Berridge. Miss Everton offers tea to a German prisoner of war, a young man who is part of a crew digging ditches near her house.

In “The Cut Finger” (1948) by Frances Bellerby, five-year-old Julia makes an upsetting discovery when she seeks help from her mother for her cut finger.

In “The Thames Spread Out” (1959) by Elizabeth Taylor, a mistress has an adventure that leads her to reconsider her relationship with her married lover while her house is flooded by the Thames.

Frankly, I had no idea what was going on with “The Smile of Winter” (1974?) by Angela Carter except someone is depressed.

Except really for one story, I very much enjoyed this collection. I received it from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2289: Heat Lightning

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Amy travels back to her childhood home in Michigan from New York ostensibly to recover from surgery but really to think about the situation with her husband, Geoffrey. There is tension among her relatives. The Westovers are a wealthy family, but it is 1930. Her father Alfred’s farm machinery factory doesn’t have many orders, but his brother DeWitt made some bad investments and is asking him for help.

Amy’s cousin Tom is drinking too much and soon has a more serious problem. Her redoubtable grandmother is managing her fortune but is dealing with requests for help from Tom and DeWitt.

Amy watches everyone’s interactions carefully, because she is looking for some inspiration. She feels that her generation has no code for behavior and is trying to formulate its own. She doesn’t know how she feels about Geoff and is looking for guidance in her parents’ loving interactions.

Although a lot of this novel is about family interactions, some of the dinner conversations are about scientific discoveries that came earlier than I expected, for example, about entropy. On the other hand, the idea of race expressed in the novel is not scientifically based (or perhaps language is not carefully used). Amy, for example, considers the European immigrant working class characters to be of a different race than her family and friends. They’re Italians and Swedes.

A distressing topic for modern audiences is what the family should do with Curly, the mentally disabled gardener.

Overall, I found this a thoughtful and interesting look at family dynamics.

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Review 2286: #DeanStreetDecember! Because of Sam

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I could fairly easily guess the main plot of Because of Sam from about page 3, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable to read.

Mild-mannered Millie Maitland has not had an easy life. Her feckless husband died leaving her badly off when her daughter Amabel was a child, and she has had a financial struggle ever since. When a relative died and left money for the use of Amabel, Millie was only delighted that she could provide for her daughter. Even though her lawyer believed she could fairly spend some of the money for her own benefit, or rather for the benefit of both of them, she refused. She has done everything for Amabel, so that her daughter has no idea of how hard Millie has worked. The result is that Amabel, now in her late twenties, is a little spoiled, plain-spoken, used to being waited on, and inconsiderate.

The farmer Martin Heriot catches sight of Millie looking young and pretty at a wedding and decides he wants to get to know her better. She makes a little money taking care of people’s dogs, so he soon makes arrangements for her to board Sam, a Labrador puppy he says belongs to his cousin. This gives him an excuse to visit Millie. But Millie, with no idea of her own attractions, gets it into her head that he is coming to see Amabel.

On another front, a new arrival to this small post-World War II Scottish village is causing problems. Mrs. Noble is a predatory blond whose husband is stationed abroad. She first goes after Martin and then after a young husband of a new mother.

Although Clavering’s books are similar to those of D. E. Stevenson, her friend and neighbor, I think that without becoming at all heavy reading, they go a little more below the surface. I enjoy them very much.

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Review 2279: The Fox in the Attic

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My only other exposure to Richard Hughes was his A High Wind in Jamaica, the reading of which was certainly a different experience than that of The Fox in the Attic. Readers may find the structure of the latter unusual, but Hughes meant it to be the first part of a huge novel called The Human Predicament, for which he finished the second part but not the third.

The main character is a young man in his early 20s named Augustine. In her introduction to the NYRB edition, Hilary Mantel says that he doesn’t notice things. But it’s more than that. He has formed ideas about what things are like and seems incapable of understanding they are not as he believes.

He has inherited a remote property in Wales and has been living there recently like a hermit. When the novel opens, he is carrying the body of a little girl whom he and his hunting companion found drowned in a marsh. He brings her home instead of leaving her at the scene because the marsh is full of rats. But nasty ideas begin floating around, so he decides to go visit his sister Mary.

Mary suggests he stay with some German relatives she spent time with just before World War I. It is 1923, and Augustine firmly believes the Germans are peace-loving, cultured intellectuals, and there will never be another war. In fact, as soon as he arrives, his relative Walther begins telling him about an incident that happened after the war in which he and others were held prisoner in a hotel, and Augustine finds it so hard to believe him that he stops listening although he has seen the proof of the incident written on the wall of his hotel room in Munich. In fact, the political situation in Bavaria is completely unstable, and inflation is so bad that an educated boy is working in the hotel as a bellman because a professional salary would not pay for his pair of shoes.

The first night Augustine stays with his family, in fact, is the night of the famous Bierhall Putsch, and we see a detailed description of Adolf Hitler as a character. But Augustine has decided he is in love with Mitzi, Walther’s oldest daughter, and doesn’t pay any attention to the political discussion. Although he realizes with a shock that she is Catholic, he’s sure he can easily convince her there is no god. In fact, he doesn’t even know she’s devout.

All the while, Augustine dithers in his romance, thinking everyone is expecting him to propose when no one has noticed he’s in love and Mitzi barely knows he exists, the political situation is worsening and there is real danger from the upper floors of the house.

I liked this novel when it stuck to everyday events, even the political ones, but when it a few times broke off into philosophical asides, I couldn’t really follow it or maybe didn’t try. The political events are somewhat elliptically covered for someone like me who isn’t familiar with them, at least insomuch as some key figures are assumed to be familiar to his audience and to me some of them are not.

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Review 2276: Classics Club Spin! The Tree of Heaven

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Although the Preface states that the tree of heaven in this novel is stripped of its false identity in the end and shows itself as merely an ash—to symbolize the stripping away of Victorian sentimentality to realism—I have to say that depicting men’s deaths in World War I as glorious isn’t a bit realistic. But never mind. The book was written in 1917, so it pretty much had to.

The novel begins in the late 19th century when Anthony and Frances Harrison are young parents and have recently bought their house. One of the things Frances loves about it is the tree of heaven, which Anthony, a timber importer, states is nothing but an ash tree. The couple have four children, Dorothy, Michael, Nicky, and John. Frances is obsessed with her children, really the boys, to the point where Anthony feels left out.

This novel is about daily life in pre-war England through the microcosm of one family. Early on, as early as the first day depicted in the novel, when Michael refuses to go to a children’s birthday party, he demonstrates a fear of what he later calls the Vortex, which seems to be giving up his individuality because of the pressure of others’ excitements. As they grow, the children encounter situations which show and determine their personalities. The family takes in Veronica, the daughter of Anthony’s brother Barty and Frances’s best friend, Vera. Although Barty is family, he has become unbearable, and Vera leaves him for her long-time friend Ferdie Cameron. But Barty refuses to give her a divorce. Nicky, by then a schoolboy, becomes close to the lonely little Veronica, and it is thinking of her situation as a young man that makes him decide to marry a woman who is pregnant by another man, not for the woman but for the sake of the child.

As a young woman, Dorothy becomes involved in the suffrage movement, but doesn’t approve of some of their tactics. She too eventually backs off from the movement because of fear of the Vortex, while Michael joins a group of avant garde poets who renounce all previous poetry.

All of this leads up to World War I and the effect it has on the family and its friends. It is an interesting and well-written novel that provides a look at an ordinary (although well-off) family in the first couple of decades of the 20th century.

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