Tag: humor

Day 609: Good Behaviour

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Cover for Good BehaviourMolly Keane was a successful author and playwright in the first half of the 20th century. Although she was known mostly for romantic frolics, Good Behaviour is certainly not in that category. In fact, at the time that she wrote it, it was rejected as being too dark. It was not published until years later, when Keane’s friend Peggy Ashcroft encouraged her to try again.

Good Behaviour is a comedy of manners and a satirical look at the life of a certain type of the Irish upper class. It startlingly begins with a murder, but I’ll leave it to readers to find out who the victim and murderer are.

After the murder, the book returns in time to recount the childhood and upbringing of Aroon St. Charles. But first it oddly shoots off to explain how Mrs. Brock, Aroon’s governess, came to them. It is telling to learn that the proper and kindly Mrs. Brock was “let go” by a friend of St. Charles, notwithstanding a good reference, because she committed the crimes of encouraging one of the boys to read poetry and comforting him after he was whipped by his father. The boy, Richard Massingham, becomes important to Aroon in later years.

Aroon is a large, unattractive girl who is desperate for affection and some acknowledgment of her own importance. She is not stupid, but she sees only what she wants to see and is incredibly naive. Although she loves Mrs. Brock, it is indicative of her character that she nevertheless makes fun of her later in life as a way to fit in with Richard and her brother Hubert. She loves her father, who treats her with casual affection, but expressiveness is considered bad form in their set.

Her relationship with her mother is more complex. Although Aroon steadfastly maintains the fiction that her parents are devoted to each other, it is clear that they are not. Mrs. St. Charles is cold and removed from her family. She has no interests in common with her husband, who spends most of his time pursuing outdoor sports and philandering. Aroon knows that, but does not seem to notice what is going on in her own house.

The events in this novel are largely trivial except for some deaths. The novel is not plot-driven but centers around the behavior of Aroon and her horsey upper-class friends, who maintain their snobbishness despite a consistent lack of funds. We see the irony when Aroon throws away her opportunity to escape her unhappy household through a combination of willful blindness and snobbery. Aroon finds her place eventually and it is a deserved one.

Although we can find some sympathy for Aroon, she is definitely an anti-heroine. If you appreciate a sly, dark, understated humor and a masterly characterization, you should look for a copy of this novel.

Day 592: Literary Wives! Wife 22

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Cover for Wife 22Today is another meeting of Literary Wives, where a group of bloggers read and discuss depictions of wives in fiction.

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I guess by definition chick lit is predictable, so perhaps it is unfair to criticize Wife 22 because I could tell where it was going before it got there. Still, I do criticize it for that, although it is well written, has funny, believable dialogue, and is quite enjoyable to read.

Alice Buckle is feeling a little dissatisfied with life. She has a handsome husband, but he has seemed withdrawn of late. She is often at loggerheads with her fifteen-year-old daughter, although she is very close with her younger son. She enjoys her work as a drama teacher at an elementary school. Still, the spark is gone between her and her husband.

She is invited by email to take part in a survey about marriage. To maintain anonymity, she is assigned a login of Wife 22 and a caseworker, Researcher 101. She finds it exciting to have a harmless secret and cathartic to answer the questions.

But it isn’t too long before the two are emailing each other outside the survey. Alice feels as if Researcher 101 really listens to her and understands her. Soon, she is fighting to keep herself out of an emotional affair. The situation is made more difficult because her husband William has abruptly lost his job.

I liked all the characters in this novel except the one I wasn’t supposed to like. However, I seldom read chick lit and again, I felt that this novel was predictable.

Literary Wives logoWhat does the book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? In what way does this woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

I have to admit this portrait of a modern wife is more well rounded than we have seen in some other books. Alice is a failed playwright—her one produced play was a flop—but she really enjoys her job working with children. As a mother, she is actively engaged with her children, although inclined to worry unnecessarily and feel inadequate. Her relationship with her husband is friendly but a bit distant. When she tries to feel him out about emotional issues, he is abrupt and dismissive. In this regard, she is needy, letting a feeling of being unloved and inadequate prevent her from dealing honestly with her husband. I’m not sure, though, that any of this says something about being a wife. I feel as if this novel comments more on marriage itself and what can happen to it if it’s allowed to grow stale. There are problems between Alice and her husband, but her husband also has his own troubles that Alice is too preoccupied to pay attention to.

The Wives

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

Day 521: The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

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Cover for The Dead in Their Vaulted ArchesThe tone of The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is a little more somber than in the previous Flavia de Luce mysteries. Just as Buckshaw was about to be sold out from under the family in the previous novel, we learned that Flavia’s mother was found. Years ago lost in a mountaineering accident, Harriet de Luce was the owner of the house. Her fortune could not be passed along to her family without proof of her death. Now, her body is on the way home.

Flavia is surprised to find her mother’s remains have received a military escort. In fact, ex-prime minister Churchill is at the village’s small train station when the body arrives.

A tall man approaches Flavia at the station and asks her to tell her father that “the Gamekeeper” is in jeopardy. Moments later he is dead, having been pushed under a train.

I was a little surprised to find Bradley playing a few of the tricks that I associate with less skillful mystery writers. One of them is to spin out the story by having a character delay doing what is obviously urgent. Flavia waits quite awhile to convey this message from the tall man.

Part of the charm of these novels is always 11-year-old Flavia, who combines high intelligence with childish naïveté and some wild ideas. This time she decides to bring her mother back from the dead using some old chemistry experiments. While trying to do this, she finds her mother’s will inside her jacket. She doesn’t pass that on right away, either.

Flavia’s adventures this time include flying in a Gipsy Moth and getting involved in espionage. Of course, there is a murderer to capture and family secrets to explore.

Still, I didn’t find this novel as much fun as I usually do. Probably because of the subject matter, Bradley has to step back quite a bit from the humor.

Flavia is growing more thoughtful, although she is still as reckless. The novel hints at a change of scene in upcoming books, and although I think Buckshaw is wonderful, perhaps we need one.

Day 516: Oryx and Crake

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Cover for Oryx and CrakeBest Book of the Week!
Snowman may be the last human left on earth after the plague. He is not alone, though, because nearby is a race of human-like beings that his friend Crake bioengineered. Snowman himself lives like a vagrant—wearing nothing but a sheet in the unbearable heat from global warming, scrounging through the detritus of a lost civilization for food.

Snowman soon realizes that he will starve if he doesn’t return to the compounds for food. Not long before, he lived in a world where the privileged workers for the biochemical industry and their families lived apart in their own secure compounds. The other people, called pleeblanders, could fend for themselves. Gene splicing to create new species was rampant without regard for any consequences, and greed and consumerism all-important.

As Snowman makes his journey, he recalls his childhood with an embittered mother and oblivious father and his long friendship with Crake. Most fondly he remembers Oryx, the love of his life. Through these memories we learn how the world got into this dire situation.

This novel is both inventive and absorbing. Although Atwood’s descriptions of the pre-plague world with its abominations of nature seem comic at times, they are still horribly believable. This is dark humor with a knife edge about a world that has lost its sanity.

Oryx and Crake is the first of a trilogy, and I am looking forward to reading the other two volumes.

Day 512: Troubles

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Cover for TroublesBest Book of the Week!
It is the summer of 1919. Major Brendan Archer has just left the hospital after his experiences in the trenches of France. When on leave in 1916, he met Angela Spencer. Although he has no recollection of having asked her to marry him, she has ever since then written him exhaustive letters signed “Your loving fiancée.” Determined to find out if he is engaged, the Major travels to the Majestic, Angela’s family hotel in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Troubles is about the decline of the once powerful Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Nothing symbolizes this decline quite as effectively as the state of the Majestic. Once a grand resort hotel, the Majestic is now the crumbling permanent home for a handful of old ladies who knew it from their heyday.

The Palm Court is so overgrown that it gets more and more difficult to find the chairs. No staff is visible when Archer checks in, and he is finally vaguely shown around by Ripon, Angela’s brother, who urges him to pick a room. When Archer retires, he finds his bed has no sheets, and his investigation of a sickly smell leads to the discovery of a sheep’s head in a pot in his room. Most frustrating, though, is that he can find no opportunity to speak to Angela, who shortly after his arrival shuts herself up in her room.

Major Archer soon finds himself drawn into the activities and personalities of the household. Angela’s father Edward seems unconcerned about the increasing decrepitude of the house. He occupies himself with projects such as raising piglets in the squash court or conducting bizarre experiments in “biological research.” He is most concerned with preventing Ripon from marrying the daughter of a merchant, whom Ripon has made pregnant. Edward’s objection? She is Catholic.

It is the time leading up to the partition of Ireland, with events that 40 years later will result in The Troubles. To Edward’s way of thinking, along with most of his class, those who want independence from Britain are nothing but hooligans. He refuses to recognize that his impoverished and desperate tenants have legitimate grievances.

The growing sense of dissolution both in Ireland and—periodically interjected by newspaper articles—in other parts of the British Empire keeps the novel from being simply a comedy such as Cold Comfort Farm. That, and Farrell’s writing style of cool and precise satire. As poor Major Archer bumbles in a well-meaning way through the political briars and Edward becomes more detached from reality, the Majestic slides perceptibly into ruin.

This is another book from my Classics Club list.

Day 492: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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Cover for The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt KidThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is billed as a memoir, but it is even more a collection of information and odd facts about 1950’s America, each chapter headed by a strange newspaper clipping from the time. This book is one of nostalgia similar to the work of Jean Shepherd, the humorist whose works centered on a slightly earlier time and author of the books that spawned A Christmas Story.

The memoirs bear many similarities to Shepherd’s, possibly because of the similarities in the imaginations and predilections of young boys, although Bryson’s continue on into the 1960’s and lose a lot of their innocence as the boys become obsessed with gaining glimpses of naked women and stealing beer. I’m guessing that a lot of the humor, with its emphasis on body functions and pranks, would be more amusing to men than to women.

Still, I found the book mildly funny. It turns out that I am roughly one month older than Bill Bryson, so I can vividly remember many of the things that Bryson relates as curiosities, clambering under our desks for the absurd air raid drills, for example, or going to view model air-raid shelters. Bryson grew up in Des Moines, a much bigger town than my own, so his memories are a little more urban than mine.

One place where my memory differs from his is in his repeated assertions that the Russians would never bomb Des Moines. When I was in the seventh grade, I distinctly remember being forced to watch an “educational” film during which we were informed that our town was among the top three bombing targets in the country (which is, of course, absurd, but we believed it). My subsequent informal research (occasionally asking people) has lead me to believe that every school child in America was told the same thing.

Readers Bryson’s age can take a brief look back through time in an afternoon of light reading. Younger readers might be surprised at some of the tidbits Bryson has uncovered, but they were no surprise to me.

Day 481: St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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Cover for St. Lucy'sDifficulties of youth and adolescence are the themes of Karen Russell’s unusual collection of short stories. Many of them are set in the Florida Everglades among bizarre and tacky theme parks or tourist destinations, where children sled through the sand on crab shells or visit enormous conches.

The first story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” provides an introduction to the two sisters who are more fully developed in Russell’s later novel Swamplandia! Abandoned momentarily at their Everglades theme park home, Ava has a murky encounter with the Bird Man and tries to rescue her sister Osceola from her ghost lover. That story is expanded in the novel, which I really enjoyed.

Although certainly all are unusual, some of the stories are more bizarre than others. In “from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration,” a 19th century family makes a difficult crossing west, their wagon pulled by their father, the Minotaur. In the title story, human children of werewolves are sent away to be raised by nuns so that they can have a better life than their parents.

Russell’s stories are at once peculiar and oddly touching, full of young misfits who are even more out of place than all adolescents think they are. At times funny, such as the descriptions of the wolf-girls’ canine behavior when trying to adjust to their new school, the stories all reverberate with longing. Russell’s writing is brilliantly fierce and original, sparked by her own peculiar vision.

A few of the stories felt to me as if the author was just trying to think of the strangest ideas possible, and she almost lost me in “Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows.” But ultimately, I enjoyed the stories, although I prefer the more developed characters and plot of Swamplandia!

Day 477: The Fault in Our Stars

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Cover for The Fault in Our StarsBest Book of the Week!
It seems as if I have read more books lately from which I do not get a sense of the characters’ personalities. I don’t feel as if they could be real people but just projections of the author’s plot. But that is not the case with The Fault in Our Stars, which creates for us some unforgettable personalities.

Hazel Lancaster is a sixteen-year-old with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. Unlike the other kids in the support group her mom has talked her into attending, she doesn’t have any hope of survival. She just wants to live as long as she can. At the group, she meets Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old ex-basketball player who has lost one leg to osteosarcoma but has a generally good prognosis.

Hazel is witty, smart, and well read. She is obsessed with a novel called An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, which is about a young girl suffering from a fatal illness, and literally ends in the middle of a sentence. As she and Augustus discuss their favorite books, Hazel explains that she just wants to know what happened to everyone else in the novel. Augustus decides to use his wish from the Genie Foundation to take Hazel to Amsterdam, where she can meet Peter Van Houten and find out what happened after the novel ended.

This novel is about teenagers falling in love, and rarely has fiction depicted two more appealing people. My one very small criticism is that they are scarily smart and funny, in intelligence reminding me more of Salinger’s Glass family than of normal kids. But Green has got the juvenile speech patterns down.

Frightfully well written, touching, funny, and ultimately sad, this novel has much to offer teens, young adults, and adults. Hazel and Augustus are affectingly human, and even Hazel’s parents, those cumbersome quantities so often ignored or eliminated in children’s or young adult fiction (note, for example, how much we see of Bella’s father in Twilight), are deftly characterized by their affectionate jokey interactions with Hazel.

Again, I feel that my capabilities are stretched here in my inability to adequately express how good this novel is. When I first started reading it, I was afraid of manipulation, as there seem to be a lot of “affliction of the month” children’s books out there right now, but that feeling left me almost immediately.

Day 431: Butterfly Winter

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Cover for Butterfly WinterI have to start right out by saying that Butterfly Winter was a poor choice for me. W. P. Kinsella is beloved by many, and I know that people are excited that this is his first novel in fifteen years. However, I should have known better than to select a book by the “master of magical realism,” as one reviewer put it, because I have a problem with magical realism. It is a very tough sell for me. I have to be fully bought into the realism before I can accept the magic. In the case of this novel, though, I don’t even think it can be called magical realism, because the realism was left out.

This novel is about baseball. That shouldn’t be a problem, although I am not a sports fan. I was willing to be wooed by The Art of Fielding into at least grasping that it can be pretty fantastic. But Kinsella doesn’t try to convince us of that. He just posits that it is wonderful and magical and obviously thinks everyone should agree with him.

I think I could have dealt with either of these two issues, but the first chapter of this novel, where the Gringo Journalist is trying to interview the Wizard, and the Wizard refuses to answer his questions but goes off on a bunch of tangents, is the most annoying piece of writing I have ever read. The novel picks up a little in the second chapter when it changes to a narrative style and picks up again every time it returns to that style, but unfortunately the irritating voice from the first chapter is the novel’s primary narrator. The tone of the novel is arch, to me a little forced, and the humor unsubtle.

http://www.netgalley.comNow to the story. Julio and Esteban Pimenthal are twins who play baseball in their mother’s womb (a wince-inducing image). One of them is born with cleats on, and the other with a baseball glove. (I think it is safe to say that only a man would have thought of that.) They are inhabitants of Courteguay, a fictional country wedged between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where magic is commonplace. (Silly me, when I read “magical Caribbean island” in the blurb, I was thinking scenery and beauty.) When Julio and Esteban are ten years old, they travel to the United States to play pro ball. But first we hear about the Wizard and how he came to the island in the late 19th century and introduced baseball to it.

I have to admit, I did not finish this book. I’m sure that many will think it delightful, but I found the narrative style too annoying to continue. This novel was the wrong one for me to choose to become acquainted with Kinsella.

Day 397: Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle

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Cover for SylvesterOn occasion, I reread a few of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, which have been some of my favorite reading for many years. Just recently, I reread Sylvester, which in some editions is titled Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.

The extremely eligible bachelor Sylvester, Duke of Salford, has decided to take a wife. His only difficulty is in deciding which of five eligible girls to marry. When his beloved mama mentions that she and her best friend made a plan for their children to marry many years before, he decides to go inspect the girl, his godmother’s granddaughter, to see if he might like her. Although he is warm and thoughtful to those he cares for, since his twin brother’s death, he has been aloof to others and comes off as haughty.

Sylvester’s visit is disguised as a hunting party, but Phoebe Marlow is informed by her detestable stepmother that the duke is coming to make her an offer. Unfortunately, Phoebe has already met Sylvester and took such a dislike to him that she used him as the villain in a novel she wrote. That novel is going to be published, despite all expectation. Normally, she would not expect him to recognize himself in a silly gothic romance that pokes fun at various society figures, but for the mention of Sylvester’s very distinctive eyebrows.

Fearful of her stepmother’s pressure and not understanding that Sylvester has no intention of proposing, Phoebe talks her childhood friend Tom into escorting her to her grandmother’s house. However, an accident and a snowstorm strand her and Tom with Sylvester in a small country inn.

After Phoebe gets to know and like Sylvester, she is horrified to find out that he has a nephew, since in her silly romance his character is a wicked uncle who wants to steal his nephew’s fortune. Another horror lurks, because Phoebe’s book proves to be a smashing success, much read by society members, who are all trying to identify their friends. Since Phoebe has never brought herself to admit to Sylvester that she wrote a book, she soon fears that people will find out she is the author.

Heyer creates delightful, engaging characters and puts them into silly and unbelievable situations, which is part of the pleasure of reading her novels. They are very well written, with entertaining and sparkling dialogue and a complete understanding of the customs, dress, and speech of the period. If you decide to read Sylvester, get ready for some fun. Many of Heyer’s novels have been re-released in the past few years, so they should not be hard to find.