Bittersweet by Miranda-Beverly Whittmore

Warning: This review is going to spoiler the hell out of the book. This is quite an odd book and it is difficult to interpret both the author's intentions and the motives of Mabel, the first person narrator. The whole book is from the point of view of the ugly duckling Mabel who becomes friends with the glamorous Ev and her family. As I grew more and more frustrated with the utterly self-obsessed Mabel I began to wonder if the author was portraying her as an unreliable narrator and if we are supposed to dislike her? She certainly turns out just as unlikable as any of the family she exposes. Everything she discovers is pointed out in VERY BIG LETTERS, like the readers are unable to draw their own conclusions. Birch is flagged up as a bad guy from half-way through the novel by his cruelty to the dog, from there he is only a tiptoe away from becoming a Nazi Art looting father of incestuous children.

Anyway, the first half increasingly reads like a YA novel about the relationships between the young people, and I got increasingly impatient for the mystery element, as all Mabel seemed to be doing was mooning over Ev and her brother Galway (was it me or did he just seemed to be sort of tagged randomly with Mabel? All of a sudden he showed up and fell in love with her even though they had nothing in common other than her creepy obsession with his family?). The second half veers into overblown Gothic with the discovery of the incest, art looting and the murder, up until the horrible end where Mabel marries rescues Lu, marries Galway and the bad guy drowns. It just seems a bit, well, preposterous that everything get tied up so neatly and Mable 'wins' becoming part of the Winslow family.
I think I judged this harshly because with all the Paradise Lost references and some of the techniques she used such as deliberately obscuring the time setting, I was expecting this to be a bit more literary. As it was, I found it quite frustrating to read. 

I know I am no writer, just a woman who has read a lot of books, but in my humble opinion here is what I would do with it:

• Make Birch a more rounded character, not just an evil villain with a mask of geniality. All he needed really was a waxed moustache to twirl.
• Cut down the number of incestuous children to one, two makes it seem a bit overblown. There could also be a bit more doubt about the incest so that it looks more like Mabel is being manipulated.
• Make Mabel and Galway have something in common other than the creepy family, even if it's a liking for flippin' Paradise Lost. 
• Yes, I know it has the potential for being a bit dull and boring, but all that financial stuff Mabel was going into also had the potential for being quite interesting, I'm sure the Winslow's could have profiteered more from Great Depressions and wars, it's just I had the feeling the author was nervous about writing about it. 
• Focus more on Tilde, who is a much more interesting character than Indo, the colourful mad aunt. Indo isn't really needed to prompt Mabel's investigations, Mabel doesn't need a motivation, she is obsessed with the family anyway and an incurably nosy voyeur who seems to be there whenever anybody has sex.
• Change the pacing a little so that the mystery is drawn out more over the first half and it's less about meeting the 50,000 members of the family and Ev's relationship with John. We get it, it's a large clan.
• Change the ending, I suppose I would have found it more satisfying if Mabel had walked away and encountered Galway/Ev/Tilde in the future, subsequently finding that they had changed the family around, rather than Mabel being the catalyst and choosing to ignore everything that had gone on if the family returned the art.  As it is, nobody in this book seems to develop as a character, especially Mabel.
• Don't spell everything out in minute detail, readers can usually draw their own conclusions.This was particularly bad after Mabel discovered that Ev and John were brother and sister. We knew as soon as Mabel remembered that John's mother's name was Pauline, we didn't need Mabel explaining, we only needed her reaction. The subtle elements of the story get overlooked if there are aspects of the narrative that are applied with a paint roller rather than a delicate brush. For instance, the use of Paradise Lost as a metaphor, good, but not so good if it's used too much. I liked the Turtle bit too, but Lu didn't need to become a Marine Biologist.  

Anyway, I hope I haven't been too nasty and given constructive criticism. As a non-writer I don't like slating books, it's just that I thought this book had unrealised potential.

Swann’s Way - Review

There is a kind of wonderful symmetry about the novel; I would describe it as being like a skilfully woven tapestry in the way that it all links together. I thought it would be useful to look at in a modernist context. I think that had it been written earlier there would have had to have been more of an emphasis on a straightforward narrative ‘autobiography’ style, whereas the book plays around with time, with language, with devices such as the inclusion of dreams and the use of food and drink to prompt memory or sensation. Nothing is fixed, and although there is a structure to it, it is not immediately apparent, unlike the earlier Victorian edifices, all craftsman built out of the solid construction of plot and character, this feels different. The plot is not linear, the characters are not fixed, and loose ends are left loose. Emotion and description are more important than plot.

It can seem as if Swann’s story has little relevance to the story of the narrator, yet it feels as if his story is the story of the narrator. I don’t know how this will be developed further in the novel but there is a feeling that the narrator is doomed to repeat Swann’s mistakes in becoming attracted to the wrong person. Also, Gilberte seems to be following her mother in the way that she seems to toy with the narrator’s affections. The narrator still hasn’t explained what prompted Swann’s unfortunate marriage either.

Frankly, this novel is a pain to read and a pain to write about. No matter what my estimation is as to how long it’s going to take me, I have to triple it then add some. I’ve had large chunks of time where I haven’t felt like picking it up, then large chunks of time where I’ve felt like reading it quite a bit. I do think it’s worth it, though. I can be reading along thinking ‘where the hell’s he going now?’ then suddenly I get an ‘aha’ moment where it all makes sense. I think it may take me two years to get to the end at least, and I may end up reading another BIHNR at the same time (I’m looking forward to reading Hilary Mantel’s books in particular). But it strengthens my concentration, particularly re-reading it on the Kindle when I am writing it up. I have no idea what to rate it as, I suppose I’d go with a four out of five, the one star being lost for sheer difficulty. 

Anyway, onto book two. 

Run by Ann Patchett (spoilers)

I am finding this novel quite hard to review. I generally enjoyed it, it was a quite gentle read with some good characters and plot twists, and I love Patchett’s writing style, but at the same time I found myself feeling quite dissatisfied with a few aspects, maybe this was because I enjoyed State of Wonder so much and found this paler in comparison.

The novel explores family relationships between Bernard Doyle and his three sons (Sullivan, who is his biological son and his two adopted sons Tip and Teddy) and Tennessee and her daughter Kenya, and what happens when Tennessee and Tip are involved in an accident. Although Tip, Teddy, Tennessee and Kenya are black, I would argue that the novel doesn’t go into race issues in any depth. The fact that Tennessee and Kenya live in a housing project and she is too poor to afford medical insurance is glossed over, as are Bernard’s previous political aspirations and life as a mayor. This would have been interesting to explore in more depth. 

 I can’t say that I felt particularly engaged with the characters, perhaps this was due to the number which meant that their stories were spread quite thin.   I agree with Leah Hagen Cohen’s  remark in her review in the New York Times suggesting that the characters ‘ultimately feel less real than symbolic, as wooden as the Virgin’s statue’ (September 30^th 2007). The problem seems to be that there is a sense that they are defined by few characteristics, particularly ‘sweet’ Teddy and ‘clever’ Tip. Father Sullivan and his namesake, Sullivan are more interesting characters in comparison, but again, Father Sullivan’s apparent healing of two women is not really explored, it’s sometimes as if she’s thrown everything in but not really found time to explore it or tie it together. 

The final issue was the clunky anaesthesia-induced reunion of Tennessee and her friend Tennessee Alice Moser. I understand why she did it (to reveal a secret to the reader that the rest of the characters weren’t supposed to ever learn), but I found it a bit of a cheesy plot device.

 In comparison, I thought the motif of the statue of the Virgin Mary was handled nicely and the ending was quite satisfying; it gave the novel a nice kind of symmetry and a sense of progression. Overall, I liked the plot as well.  I feel as if I’ve mostly written about the negative aspects, even though I didn’t feel that negatively towards it when I was reading it. Overall, it’s an uplifting, entertaining book, and I am probably judging it too harshly for what it isn’t rather than what it is. 

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Cohen-t.html

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley (some spoilers)

Wonderfully appropriate cover image

First, a word about the edition.  I’ve been reading the 2003 Penguin edition edited by Douglas Brooks-Davies and not been that keen. His introduction and notes are peppered with numerous spoilers and he has a tendency to over-analyse everything. If I was studying the book properly or re-reading it I would be really happy with it, but as it is a book that should be read without that much knowledge of the plot, I was disappointed with the heavy-handed editing. Having read the Colm Toibin introduction (available here on the NYRB Classics website), I think I’d prefer that edition. 

Leaving the edition aside, I really liked this book.  Hartley uses lyrical, evocative prose which perfectly captures the voice of young Leo and gives a sense of the period. I could see the resemblance between Hartley’s narrative style and Proust’s, but it wasn’t quite as difficult to read – paragraphs are shorter and are interspersed with dialogue. 

The plot is quite simple, but builds tension well. It begins with Leo remembering the summer of 1900 spent at Brandham Hall with a school friend. Leo innocently agrees to pass love letters between Marian (the school friend’s sister) and Ted (a local farmer) not realising why he is doing it or the implications that it will have for the family and for himself. 

The book works because of the way it is narrated in the first person with Leo gradually discovering what he is doing. He is an incredibly naïve character who is teased by the family because of it, and several humourous incidents in the novel occur due to his misunderstanding or interpreting something too literally. He lives with his widowed mother with whom he has a close relationship and is a rather sensitive child, who believes that he can affect circumstances with magic. With a lack of male guidance at home and feeling an outsider due to the fact that he is from a lower class than his friend Marcus, he is attracted to Marian, to Lord Trimingham (Hugh) and to Ted in turn.  

His relationship with Ted is peculiar; there is a suggestion that he is sexually attracted in the way that he admires Ted’s body and particularly in a deleted scene where Ted gives him a swimming lesson.  But this is a book which is about sexual awakening, Hartley uses belladonna as a symbolic device suggesting the ‘poisonous’ sexual undercurrents, alongside the imagery of the zodiac signs of the Virgin and the Water-Carrier and the changes in temerature.  Although it isn’t as explicit, the passage describing the swimming scene where Leo first observes Ted reminded me of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there is a similar overlap between the natural world and sexuality, and like Mellors, Ted is unashamed of his body and sexuality:

His clothes were lying at his side; he hadn’t bothered to seek the shelter of the rushes. Nor did he now. Believing himself to be unseen by the other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body.

The first person narrative leaves the relationship between Ted and Marian open to interpretation.  Marian can be read as a rather selfish, cold character who intends to use Leo from the moment he arrives at Brandham Hall, and is using Ted as a bit of fun before she marries Hugh, or as a rather mixed-up woman who is about to be forced into a marriage with a man she doesn’t love for the sake of the propriety of marrying within her own class and living at Brandham Hall who has an intense relationship with a local farmer. By the end, many years later, it is clear that she is still deceiving herself about the relationship with Ted, having intended to carry it on even when she was married.  Hartley apparently intended the reader to disapprove of the relationship, particularly of Ted apparently seducing Marian, but despite Leo’s suspicion that he is being used by both parties, there is something nice about the character of Ted, he is probably the most likable character in the book as the upper class characters can be rather cold and distant. 

The ending, before the epilogue is devastating. Although I knew what was going to happen, it was still a surprise. It is done in such a quick way.  People have criticised the prologue and the epilogue as a framing devices, in some ways the epilogue could be seen as somehow ‘softening’ the impact of the end of the story, but in other ways this is a book about the past and its effect particularly on Leo, but also on other characters in the novel, both the events of the novel and the significance of the wars the characters have participated in. The prologue and the epilogue show that Leo has rejected relationships completely. Perhaps this is because of his latent homosexuality, but there is a sense that after his nervous collapse, Leo not only finds it difficult to form romantic relationships, but also finds it difficult to trust anyone. 

Overall, it's one of those books that stays with you, and having thought about it since finishing the book I find myself realising more about the book. It will quite likely become a re-read in the future.