Book reviews (December 2021)
Some new books, & also classics from Joan Didion, Nora Ephron & Patricia Highsmith
The monthly book yammerings! Some of these are new and some are ‘seriously, how had you missed out on that one?!’ types (answer: ‘there are a lot of books in the world’). More bookish thoughts to come in 2022. (No YA column this month due to the Christmas break - but there’ll be two in January.)
(originally posted on Instagram)
I read this back in August or September, which was possibly not the ideal time for this wintry Christmassy treat. Jenny Colgan is so good on cosy, warm, emotional reads, & settings that are a little bit wish-fulfilment but not too perfect. In this instance, the scenario is an old fusty bookshop in Edinburgh almost destined to go out of business, and it's salesgirl Carmen's job to try to revamp the place in time for Christmas. (She's at a bit of a loose end, having lost her job & having to stay in her brilliant sister's spare room... a situation that involves feeling like a failure on a daily basis.) Along the way, she finds love (but which of the two men in her life is better for her? The obviously sexy one or the more quiet kind one? I think you know the answer...) & learns some life lessons along the way.
It's not going to astonish you with the plot twists, especially if you're a Colgan fan & familiar with how she does things, but it is a very lovely read & a bit of a love-letter to Edinburgh at Christmas.
(originally posted at Instagram)
Whenever I read a memoir that includes descriptions of time spent resting, or recovering, or debilitated by illness, I wonder: how did you afford this? How did you pay the bills during this time, how did the guilt of not working eat you alive, how did you not get into debt, how did you wrangle your way back into the working world? And this gnawed at me as I read Katherine May's Wintering, which is part personal & part philosophical & sociological account of the role "wintering" can & should play in our lives. What does "winter" mean for us in our disconnected-from-nature lives? Can sea swimming cure depression? (May votes yes.)
There is some beautiful writing in here, about the impossibility of moving quickly when things are hard, & about the difficulty of "retreating" from things for a bit, but then there'll be a trip abroad to experience something "winter"-ish or a move to a house by the sea & it all starts feeling a bit, seriously? Seriously?
I can see why this book would have appealed to many in early lockdown/pandemic times, & there really are some lovely bits in there, but it's not one I'd be pressing earnestly into anyone's hands.
(originally posted on Instagram, just a couple of days before news of Didion’s own death)
Do you know how sometimes, for whatever reason, you get an Idea of a book in your head that is not entirely logical, were you to think it through (but you don't because we all live busy lives)? In my head, anyway, I had conflated this book with that one yer man wrote about the diving bell & the butterfly, the blink-y one, & it was only earlier this year (I suspect a @lauraeatsbooks review was a factor here) that I thought, HOLD ON A SECOND, surely I am not imagining that JOAN DIDION wrote a fluffy life-affirming count-your-blessings book? (Which may be unfair to the diving bell yoke, but anyway.)
So I read it & oh fucking hell it's excellent & brutal & devastating & precise, an account of how grief messes up your world & changes it & you & there is no easy comfort to be sought out here. It's about how impossible yet inevitable death is. An eloquent scream of a book.
(also Instagram)
So, obviously, what you do after having your heart & brain shaken by Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she depicts the year after her beloved husband's death, is go read the follow-up, in which her daughter Quintana (hospitalised in Magical Thinking) dies before her 40th birthday, & Didion reflects on that life as well as her own increasingly frailty. The "blue nights" here are both literal & metaphorical; a time of the year when the sky is deeply, beautifully blue even as the days grow shorter, a time of your life when there is intensity & loss.
Didion looks back on Quintana's adoption & childhood, as well as a troubled adulthood involving addiction & mental illness before the sudden onset of the physical illness that would kill her within a year. We move from hospital beds to weddings, from childhood fears to adult regrets. It is precise & painful & compelling.
This novel by Yiyun Li follows a memoir in which she wrote about her own experiences of depression & suicidality, & follows an incredibly difficult life experience: losing her 16-year-old to suicide. In this fictional version of events, the narrator, too, has suffered that loss, but this mother is able to hold conversations with her son still, meeting somewhere between life & death, or time & aftertime. They discuss such things - the big topics rather than the precise circumstances of his death - as well as language & how they each make sense of the world (she relies on the solidity of nouns; he prefers the intangibity of adjectives).
It is a strange & aching & thought-provoking book that demands intellectual as well as emotional engagement. I can't quite say I "enjoyed" it but I do feel like I "experienced" it, & that said experience matters. (Maybe sometimes witnessing art is witnessing human pain, I contemplate, but I am not sure that does justice to someone's craft.) I would recommend.
(originally posted at Instagram)
I mean, I know. I know. How did it take me so long to read this gem, particularly with the love of the rom-coms & the non-fiction writing? It is nearly as though there are an awful lot of books in the world that you want to read, & you do not have time to read them all, & sometimes you are not quite in the mood for a certain thing... but oh, Heartburn.
It is both funny & brutal, this novel. It bears similarities to certain events in Ephron's own life, obviously, & she has a very sharp observation in her foreword about how the word "autobiographical" tends to be applied so much more to women's work than men's, as though they invent everything from their own genius brains while the silly ladies must scrabble desperately to make sense of their own lives. Yes. Quite.
Anyway. Rachel, a neurotic Jewish food writer married to a political journalist, discovers said journalist is having an affair. Rachel is furious & hurt & broken & then also there's a robbery at her group therapy session & it all gets a bit mad (in a well-structured, well-plotted sort of way). Alongside the quotable lines & paragraphs there is that pervasive feeling of shame - to have let yourself fall in love, to trust someone. The stupidity of it! What were you thinking?
Turn it into a story, an anecdote, & laugh at yourself before other people can.
Oh I utterly adored this. I'm so glad to have read it.
(originally posted at Instagram)
Another one in No, I Can't Believe I Hadn't Read It Earlier Either What Was I Thinking land, this is. Originally published in the early 1950s under a pseudonym as The Price Of Salt (image of early cover in the link), this gorgeous Patricia Highsmith novel offers readers a story about two women in love WHERE NEITHER DIE. (I know, spoilers, but it's basically what the book is known for, it's a bit like going "spoiler alert: he comes back!" for the Bible.)
It is such a swoony novel about the dizzying, obsessive nature of first love, even when it's with someone a bit difficult (as Carol certainly is) & even when the world is out to get you (Carol & protagonist Therese are followed on their roadtrip-of-love by an investigator gathering evidence about their illicit shenanigans to use in Carol's divorce & custody cases). There is tension, there is stylishness, there is the intense emotional experience rendered so perfectly on the page.
I LOVED IT SO MUCH, which was in no way a surprise, to be honest, & not having read it yet meant I was able to vanish into it while waiting for & then recovering from my booster shot thing, & honestly, would firmly recommend this for such times. It's impossible to get cranky about queues & side-effects when you've vanished into this elegant & taut love story.
(Also as an extra treat, I had been holding off on the movie until I read the book - I understand much much joy awaits. I mean, Todd Haynes, like.)
Wish You Were Here: Appeal lies in satisfying blend of familiar Picoult elements (originally published in the Irish Times)
Chapter one: “March 13, 2020”. The ominous chords play themselves as Jodi Picoult’s latest title opens; nothing good can be on its way.
Wish You Were Here is Picoult’s 25th novel (not counting coauthored projects with her daughter) and long-time readers have a fairly clear idea what to expect. There will be atopical issue – sometimes, but not always, involving a legal battle.
There will be information about something that relates to the human conflict of the story, a heavily researched topic that may be handled well (the elephants in Leaving Time, the eugenics programmes in Second Glance) or more clumsily (ancient Egypt in The Book of Two Ways). There will be a twist that you may see coming (it will be well-crafted, but 20 novels from any writer is a masterclass in the tricks they employ).
Prolific authors build up their readers’ trust in this way, and sometimes it’s needed: who in their right mind wants to revisit spring 2020 unless they know they’re in excellent hands? (Already some readers will mutter: not even then.)
Wish You Were Here does not exactly do anything groundbreaking, either in the context of the literary canon as a whole or as a Jodi Picoult book. Its appeal lies more in the satisfying blend of those familiar Picoult elements, all operating at their best. Narrator Diana, an art dealer, is left to travel solo on a much-anticipated holiday to the Galápagos (do note the link to Darwin and evolution here) when her doctor-boyfriend can’t get out of work.
About to turn 30, Diana had planned for him to propose while there; the arrival of Covid-19 in America throws her carefully laid plans into chaos. She lands thousands of miles from home just in time for the island to go into its own lockdown. And so begins a strange new life where she’s forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew. To evolve, in other words.
The balance between the personal journey and the big issues is deftly managed, with didacticism kept to the side. This is the novel the last season of Grey’s Anatomy wishes it could be, a smart and emotional page-turner that makes space for individual life crises in the face of a global one.