Tag: dysfunctional families

Review 2322: A Well Full of Leaves

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Laura is from a poor family, but lack of money isn’t the problem so much as lack of love. Her father earns very little and is often drunk. Her mother constantly complains, offers no affection to her children, and tells them they are ungrateful.

At the opening of the novel, Anda, the oldest at 16, is beautiful but selfish. Robert, at 14, loves reading about history but has been made to quit school for a job as a clerk. Both pick on Steve, the youngest at 11, who deeply feels the lack of affection. Only Laura, who is 12 or 13, seems to care about him, and she has learned to adapt to their circumstances by losing herself in the tiny details of life, to enjoy living. She tries to teach her outlook to Steve, but he just becomes more bitter.

A crisis comes when Steve is 14. Although he is the best student of Greek in school and has a good chance at university, their mother tells him she removed him from school so he can work. This is just meanness, because Anda is leaving home, and Robert and Laura are working, so the household is better off than it ever has been. After a huge family fight, Steve burns all his books.

The novel begins to be about the relationship between Laura and Steve. Steve becomes a famous actor with a very bad reputation. He has many affairs but says he loves only Laura. Once their father dies, Laura goes to live with Steve. The real crisis comes when Laura falls in love.

Although I agree with a lot of Laura’s ideas, Myers expresses them far too often and in a florid writing style that seems to belong to the early Romantics. Sometimes, I had no idea what she was talking about and other times, I didn’t want to think about it enough to figure it out. Parts of the novel are absolutely fraught in tone, especially at the end.

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Review 2267: House-Bound

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I read Mrs. Tim Carries On just before reading House-Bound, and they made an interesting contrast. They were written about the same time during World War II and both set in Scotland, House-Bound in a fictional city that stands in for Edinburgh and Mrs. Tim in the town base of her husband’s regiment. Both are social comedies, but whereas Mrs. Tim is busy raising her children and doing war work and remaining as upbeat as possible, Rose Fairlaw has raised her children, tends to the depressive, and fully realizes she is looking at the death of her way of life.

House-Bound begins with Rose at the registry hoping to get two servants to replace the two girls who are leaving to work in munitions. It’s clear to her that there are plenty of employers and no one to be employed. When someone remarks that millions of women do their own housework, she decides to try, even though she is fifty and has never done any housework or cooking.

The Laidlaws live in an ancient stone tower with a larger, comfortable Victorian addition. Aside from not exactly knowing how to do the work, Rose seems to have no idea that you might not clean every room every day or that one woman can’t be expected to do what three women used to. But almost immediately she meets Major Hosmer, an American who intrudes himself upon her to make domestic suggestions such as converting the small pantry on the main floor into a little kitchen so she doesn’t have to go up and down stairs to the basement kitchen.

Rose is struggling ineptly with the cleaning and serving her husband disgusting messes, but it appears to occur to no one else in the family to do any work. The family dynamics are important in this novel. Rose was a young mother and widow during World War I when she married Stuart Laidlaw, a widower with a frail only son, Mickey, whose mother died in childbirth. Rose became consumed with caring for Mickey, especially after he almost died, to the evident neglect of her own difficult daughter, Fiona, who has grown up ready to take offence and ready to blame everything on her mother. Major Hosmer is actually an acquaintance of Fiona, and his mistaken idea of her mother is straightened out almost immediately upon meeting her.

Luckily, the registry office comes up with Mrs. Childe, who is willing to teach Rose and work with her three hours a day, but her standards are so high that Rose is exhausted. She become house bound, with no time to do anything else, but Peck extends that idea to the lives of her class—that they are stuck in their ideas and habits.

At first, being someone who has always had to do my own housework (although admittedly not to their standards), I felt impatient of Rose and the others who seemed to thing she was taking on some momentous task. But later I feel I missed some of the comedy in my sympathy for her general conditions. There are some great comic characters here, who are as irritating as they are funny, although I was a little irked at the idea that an American major would push his way into Rose’s house not only to make home improvement suggestions but to make the dinner and do the dishes. I don’t believe that character at all. But Cousin Mary, who is always right, a single woman who keeps trying to force poor exhausted Rose into doing war work—and then there is Grannie Con-Berwick.

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Review 2248: Road Ends

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Mary Lawson’s subject is always dysfunctional families in distress living in the far north of Ontario. That sounds deadly, but her novels are absorbing and touching, and Road Ends is no exception.

The novel is told from three different perspectives at slightly different times. Megan Cartwright begins it in 1966, although there is a prologue set in 1967. In the prologue, the best friend of her brother Tom commits suicide where Tom will find him. This doesn’t at first seem to have much to do with Megan’s earlier section but informs Tom’s behavior throughout.

The Cartwrights is a large household of boys with only Megan and her mother the females. Megan’s mother Emily keeps having babies, and Megan is the only one keeping the household organized. Emily retreats to the bedroom with the baby, and Edward, her father, to his study after work. In 1967, baby Adam is a toddler, and Mary has overheard the doctor telling her parents he must be the last child, so she feels free to leave, having realized she will never have a life if she stays. She makes plans to go to Toronto in order to save money to go to London and stay with a friend, but when her father learns her plans, he pays for her to go to London.

Edward has withdrawn himself from the family. One reason is that he is terrified of becoming like his father, a drunkard who used to beat him. He has felt an overpowering anger at times, especially against his sons Peter and Corey, who are always fighting and breaking things. His section of the novel is set in 1969 in roughly the same timeframe as Tom’s, but because of his withdrawal, he hasn’t noticed the household descending into chaos.

For Tom, his friend’s suicide has sent him into a tailspin. He thinks he could have saved him if he had paid more attention. Tom was graduated from college and had job offers in engineering from two aircraft companies, but six months later, he is driving the snow plow at night and spending the day reading the newspaper. He can’t stand to be around people. But he starts noticing that Adam, now four, isn’t being cared for. His mother has had another baby and seems to only care for it. The house is filthy, the child is filthy, and there is no food in the house.

Mary, after a very rough start, has found her dream job in London running a small hotel. She was furious to hear her mother was pregnant again, and she is still homesick but determined not to go back.

I was extremely touched by the ending of this novel. Another really good book from Lawson. I can’t seem to go wrong with her.

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Review 2231: Literary Wives! Sea Wife

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

My Review

At the beginning of Sea Wife, I thought, oh no, it’s in he said/she said format, which I’m already sick of. That’s not really what’s going on, though. Eventually we realize that Michael’s ship log entries are interspersed with Juliet’s thoughts as she reads them.

Juliet is home after a voyage in the Caribbean. Before the trip, she had been suffering from post-partum depression since the birth of her 2 1/2-year-old boy George (or Doodle). Then her husband Michael convinced her they should buy a sailboat and go to sea. She was terrified of this idea, having no sailing experience herself. However, eventually she agreed. Michael wanted to sail around the world, but she convinced him to sail in the Caribbean off Panama, where they ended up buying the boat, so they could stay near land. Along with them went Doodle and seven-year-old Sybil.

Michael is right about one thing—the adventure forces Juliet out of herself. It also focuses attention on their marriage. They have some lovely moments, but dread arises as we slowly realize that Michael has not returned home.

After my initial bad reaction, which only lasted a few pages, I found this novel absolutely compelling. The descriptions of their stops and of the seas are vivid and beautiful. Both Michael and Juliet have the opportunity to unearth some of their own demons.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

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First I have to rant a little about how unprepared this couple were to take on this kind of trip. Michael’s teenage years spent doing a few trips on Lake Erie were definitely not enough experience to set sail on the ocean with his family, especially when Juliet has never sailed. They’re not sailing on a cabin-cruiser-type yacht but on a sailing vessel, which is much more complicated. He tries to teach her during the trip, but she gets confused about the names of things and is afraid of doing something wrong. This mid-life crisis experiment seemed so stupid to me that it took me a while to get past it. They lived in Connecticut, for heaven’s sake. As this was supposed to be his life-long dream, he could have rented a boat and taught her to sail before they went.

In any case, a sailboat, however large, is a good place to focus the mind on the family problems. Michael seems to have been breathtakingly self-absorbed during Juliet’s depression, leaving her alone with the kids almost all the time and not helping with the housework.

Michael loves Juliet, but he harbors a lot of resentment against her for being depressed and for focusing on her memories of being abused by a family friend. He seems angry that she turned out to be a different person than she seemed to be when they met, a woman he thought was brave and self-assured..

Juliet is afraid she no longer loves Michael. Her political beliefs are opposite to his and he hasn’t handled her depression well.

I like how their relationship ebbed and flowed during the trip, with good times and not so good, like a real marriage, instead of (more common with our Literary Wives books) being unrelentingly bad. Living the dream, Michael is nicer and more involved with the kids even though he is occasionally impatient and Juliet has gotten out of herself. The couple end up really having adventures, as well as working out some of their problems. But how does it end? I’m not telling.

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Review 2189: Faith Fox

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The cover of my Europa edition of Faith Fox is a little misleading, because although the plot of the novel revolves around a child, the child is a baby, not the young girl shown on the cover. You have to wonder sometimes if the artist ever reads the book or even knows what it is about.

When Holly Fox dies in childbirth, her mother Thomasina can’t bear to see the baby, Faith. The baby’s father, Andrew Braithwaite, seems oddly uninterested in her and anyway works brutal hours in the hospital. So, he decides to take her to his brother Jack, an Anglican priest who runs any experimental farm up in Yorkshire.

Jack is a sort of living saint, whose work barely supports a small community made up of ex-cons and Tibetans. The down side of this is his lack of sense. He trusts everyone, has no concept of a feasible project, and tends to forget the practical aspects of life. His little community lives in extreme discomfort and doesn’t accomplish much. He forgets Faith almost as soon as she arrives and his wife Jocasta has her reasons for avoiding Faith—she has been in love with Andrew since they met, but he could not afford to marry. So, he dropped her and her son off at Jack’s and later got engaged to Holly.

In fact, the only people yearning to see and care for Holly are Andrew’s parents, Toots and Dolly. But they are elderly and Andrew avoids bringing her to visit. Philip, Jocasta’s ten-year-old son, also cares about Faith and worries about her at school, but her care is basically left up to the Tibetans.

In the meantime, Thomasina scandalizes her friends by missing her daughter’s funeral to go to Egypt with Giles, an elderly colonel she just met. And Andrew and Jocasta have revived their affair after he brought Faith up to Yorkshire.

Gardam certainly has a gift for depicting dotty upper-class characters, selfish people, and hopeless charitable projects in the novel, as well as some peculiar lower-class characters. She also clearly understands the workings of grief, both bereavement and the lovesick kind. I’ve discovered Gardam late, but I’m really enjoying her.

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Review 2184: Literary Wives! The Harpy

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

My Review

Lucy writes copy from home and is raising her two small sons, having given up greater career ambitions upon motherhood. Although bored, she is reasonably content until she finds out her husband, Jake, has been having an affair with an older coworker.

Lucy, whom we eventually learn grew up with a physically abusive father and a psychologically abusive mother, has always been fascinated by harpies. She is immediately filled with rage, yet she is also embarrassed by the concern of her friends once she realizes they all know, and in some ways she seems to find fault with herself. She thinks she is a poor housekeeper and a poor mother, although it seems clear that Jake doesn’t do much work around the house and that she is a loving mother.

The couple make a deal that she can hurt Jake three times in return for him hurting her. But the hurting seems to have two effects—it seems to bring out more savagery in Lucy and it seems to make Jake behave as if everything is all right.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this novel, although it provides insight into modern suburban life as well as abusive relationships. Frankly, it made me feel a little squeamish at times.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

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Although this novel makes observations about marriage in crisis and dissolution, it also makes precise observations about the tedium, aggravations, and isolation of modern marriage and motherhood. Jake seems to think that after Lucy has had her three cracks at him, everything should go back to normal. For her part, Lucy realizes that when she forgave her father years ago for abusing her mother, her feelings became diluted. So, this novel is about Lucy recognizing and affirming her rage. Although that doesn’t seem to be a good thing for their marriage, no one seems to figure this out.

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Review 2173: Iza’s Ballad

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When Ettie Szȍcs’s husband Vince dies, she is terrified of being left alone in her house in the small town where they’ve lived for many years. So, she is relieved when her daughter Iza tells her Ettie will come to live with her in Pest, in her modern apartment. Iza has always been the light of her and Vince’s lives, a proud defender of her father as a child after he was dismissed from his position as a judge for political reasons, an excellent student who worked against the Nazis during the war, now a respected doctor, a post-Stalinist modern woman. Ettie also has an invitation to stay in her own house with Antal, her ex-son-in-law, who bought it. But even though she still treats Antal like a son, she pays little attention to his invitation. In fact, she is more than a little befuddled by grief.

Iza is self-assured and always tries to do the right thing. However, she allows her mother no input into her own fate. She arranges to sell her mother’s house to Antal and puts her mother on a train directly after the funeral, not even giving her time to attend the little gathering that was planned. When eventually Ettie arrives in Pest expecting to see her furniture and little keepsakes, she finds Iza has sold or given away most of her possessions.

Ettie just wants to be useful. Although a simple soul who is easily frightened, she is still an active woman in her 70’s who is used to doing everything for herself and her husband. In Pest, she thought she could cook and clean for her daughter, but Iza has a housekeeper and doesn’t want Ettie to interfere. Iza believes Ettie should be happy to relax, but Ettie literally has nothing to do.

Iza works hard and then wants time alone or with her friends. It takes a remark from Domokos, Iza’s lover, to make her realize that Ettie is lonely. But even when they try to arrange a treat for Ettie, it’s something they want to do rather than something that would please Ettie.

The introduction to the NYRB edition says the novel asks what to do with the old and talks about Ettie’s inability as a country person to adapt to the city, but I think this novel is more a character study of Iza, a person who always thinks she knows best and is blind to the feelings of others. Her marriage to Antal was her only failure, and she still doesn’t understand why he left, since he was clearly in love with her. It’s a fascinating but sad novel.

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Review 2139: French Braid

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In 2010, Serena and her boyfriend James run into her cousin Nicholas in the train station. James is surprised that Serena isn’t quite sure it is him and doesn’t seem to know much about her Uncle David’s family. French Braid explores the roots of this division in the family, beginning in the 50s or 60s.

It begins with a family vacation, the only one the family every took. Robin Garrett isn’t very at home on the lake. He is interested in gadgets but finally finds a fellow vacationer to talk to. Mercy Garrett gets preoccupied with her painting, and neither she nor Robin seem to think there is anything wrong with their 15-year-old daughter Lily hanging out with a college-age boy. Silly Lily thinks her new boyfriend is going to ask her to marry him. We see most of this holiday from the point of view of Alice, the older girl, who is worried about Lily. Mercy is at least attuned to her youngest, eight-year-old David, and notices that something has happened while Robin was teaching David to swim.

As with other Tyler books, the attention isn’t always focused on Alice. The next section is about Mercy and how she gains her independence after David leaves for college. Both his sisters are now married, but Lily has decided she picked the wrong man. Mercy looks for word from David, but he begins his separation right after he leaves for college, and we don’t find out why until the end of the novel.

Tyler employs some of her tropes here—the work-obsessed husband and the ditsy wife for one—and is occupied with the same generations she usually deals with. But her characterizations are always rich and empathetic, her stories always interesting. This one is right up there as she explores the intricate connections of family life.

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Review 2121: Young Mungo

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Twice recently I’ve had the same unusual experience with my reading. I was looking forward to reading a second novel by an author who wrote a book that I loved, only to find the second novel seemed to be very much the same as the first, as if the writer was stuck somehow. This happened with Young Mungo.

Mungo is a caring 14-year-old Glaswegian gay boy with an alcoholic mother, a sister planning her escape, and a violent brother. Sound familiar, those of you who have read Shuggie Bain? The novel begins with Mungo being packed off on a camping trip with two men his mother barely knows from her AA meetings. He is poorly clad and equipped, the men are drunk, and a feeling of dread is the immediate effect. In between chapters that continue this story, the novel returns to scenes from Mungo’s past.

Set in the 1990’s, the novel is similar to Shuggie Bain except that Mungo is older and the novel is even more grim and violent at times. Still, it is compelling and becomes less like the other novel as it goes along. I ended up liking it but not so sure I want to visit that world a third time.

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Review 2098: Yoked with a Lamb

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After reading several Clavering books, I’ve decided that one of her strengths is in depicting a warm family and village life. It comes slowly in Yoked with a Lamb.

The village of Haystown in Southern Scotland is shocked and excited to learn that the Lockharts are returning to the area—all of them, including Andrew, who ran off with another woman several years ago. Andrew and Lucy are trying again and moving back to his beloved home. Lucy Lockhart has asked Andrew’s cousin, Kate Heron, to oversee preparations to open the house.

Although Lucy and the children are supposed to arrive there before Andrew, one day he stops by on his way north. Kate spends some time with him and his good friend Robin Anstruther. She begins to be attracted to Robin when she learns that he also was madly in love with the woman Andrew ran off with.

Kate thinks Andrew has treated Lucy abominably, but as the family gathers, she sees that Lucy constantly finds fault with him and throws his past in his face. She also tends to boss her children around and deprive them of small pleasures for no apparent reason. As Andrew and Lucy try to work out their problems, Kate tries to deal with her feelings for Robin.

I am enjoying the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints of Molly Clavering’s work very much. She was a neighbor and friend of the better-known D. E. Stevenson, but I have found Clavering’s books slightly more substantial.

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