Three Things: February 2019

With thanks to Paula of Book Jotter for hosting—new participants always welcome!

Reading: I’ve read SO MUCH NONFICTION this month, it’s unreal. (Okay: four books out of a probable fourteen. But it feels like a lot.) Three of them I read back to back: Hallie Rubenhold’s historical group biography The Five, which I wrote a longer post on here; Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which combined investigative journalism with cultural history in a most engaging way; and Siri Hustvedt’s essay collection A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women, which deals with neuroscience, philosophies of perception, art history, and gender relations, amongst other extremely erudite things. The fourth, Nick Coleman’s Voices, provided an overview of 20th-century pop and rock music that’s proving extremely useful for the novel I’m currently reading: Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, about a (fictional) ’70s band.

I also feel as though my reading has had a lot of internal coherence and resonance this month; What I Loved, In the Full Light of the Sun, and A Woman Looking At Men… all dealt with the creation and value of art, while Voices and Daisy Jones and the Six have the connection mentioned above; The Warlow Experiment and The Five both made me think about class oppression, albeit in different centuries; The Warlow Experiment even had some resonance with Chris Beckett’s Clarke Award-winning novel Dark Eden, which I also read this month, in that both involve deliberate scientific experimentation, and both have characters who are trying to wrap their minds around a form of experience that has hitherto been totally alien to them.

Looking: Two things here, one high-brow and one low. To start with the latter: I rapidly became obsessed with Netflix’s new superhero series The Umbrella Academy and binged it in a week. It has many weaknesses–the dialogue is often pedestrian, and the pacing is glacial–but its aesthetic, which might be best described as Wes Anderson meets Quentin Tarantino, works remarkably well for me. I’m particularly fond of the lugubrious hitman-with-a-conscience Hazel (played by Cameron Britton, who really rocks facial hair), and his romance with diner waitress Agnes (played, with absolutely no fuss, by Sheila McCarthy, who’s 30 years older than Britton; I’d love to know if this age difference is in the original comics, and if so, fuckin’ awesome). I also love the way that teenage actor Aidan Gallagher nails the mannerisms of a world-weary 58-year-old time-traveling assassin trapped inside his own 13-year-old body. (It’s…look, it’s complicated.) Ellen Page is fantastic as the permanently snubbed youngest sibling Vanya, the only member of her superhero family without any discernible powers–she exudes sadness and passivity in a manner that makes her both sympathetic and annoying–and John Magaro, who plays her way-too-fast-moving love interest, has the extraordinary ability to be ineffably creepy while doing and saying things that appear to be nothing but charming. I can’t bloody wait for season 2.

(The high-brow is that I went to a Pinter double-header with my brother for his birthday: we saw A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter, the latter of which starred Martin Freeman and Danny Dyer, who work together brilliantly. They were my first Pinter plays and I do get what all the fuss is about; his repetitive dialogue-writing style works a scene or a mood the way bakers work dough, over and over again, so that you get new layers of meaning with each repetition.)

Thinking: I should have written something by now about my predictions for the Women’s Prize longlist, and I haven’t, and probably won’t, and I’m SORRY, okay. (On the other hand, I finished the first draft of my novel two weeks ago, so it’s not like I’ve been slacking.) Anyway, I’m still planning to shadow the Women’s Prize, along with (hopefully) Eric Anderson of Lonesome Reader and author Antonia Honeywell. Stay tuned; the official longlist is announced on the 4th.

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Reading Diary: Feb. 19-Feb. 25

Voices, by Nick Coleman: An exploration of the pop and rock singers whose sound has meant something to Coleman, an established music journalist. They’re not necessarily the most technically adroit or conventionally beautiful voices, but they’re the ones that have connected somewhere deep in his gut. His writing is both off-the-wall (the first chapter includes extended musing on a putative race of post-apocalyptic ant-men and their likely reaction to the music of Elvis Presley and Little Richard) and effectively personal (there’s a beautiful section on watching a friend have a panic attack to the sounds of Joy Division). Really worthwhile – now I have a playlist.

The Snakes, by Sadie Jones: An impressively sinister slow-burner of a novel about a couple whose plan to take a few months out goes immediately awry when they visit wife Beatrice’s brother Alex at his non-functioning hotel in France. Jones is terrifically, and terrifyingly, perceptive on the emotional claustrophobia of wealthy families, on the warping effects of dishonesty in a marriage when both partners come from very different social backgrounds, and on the frustrating culs-de-sac of  French bureaucracy and law. The ending explodes in completely unexpected violence–which will divide opinion–but I think it’s a brave authorial choice. Also, it’s impossible to put down.

Currently reading: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, the only autofiction I’ve read that, so far, isn’t making me obscurely want to punch someone.

Reading Diary: Feb. 12-Feb. 18

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, by Siri Hustvedt: A magisterial collection of essays on perception, gender relations, and painting, amongst other things. Hustvedt has had a lively interest in the mind for many years; she introduces the book as a series of attempts to resolve (and thereby reject) CP Snow’s “two cultures” dichotomy. The first section–mostly cultural criticism, including essays on Pina Bausch and Knausgaard–doesn’t require much specialist knowledge. The second and third, which focus more heavily on neuroscience, particularly on what’s known as “the mind-body problem”, require concentration. By no means an easy book, but one that has made me think and will reward rereading.

The Five, by Hallie Rubenhold: This group biography of the “canonical five” women presumed to have been killed by the same person–known to history as Jack the Ripper–in 1888 is long overdue. Rubenhold gives each woman her own section, exploding sensationalist myths and prejudices with every word. Only one of the five, for instance, was employed as a sex worker; only one (the same one) was under twenty-five. More significant  are the facts that the majority were alcoholics, and separated from a husband. Compassionate and unsentimental, Rubenhold’s description of the trajectories of their lives makes the similarities between these women and the homeless population of modern London painfully clear. I’ve written a longer piece on this here.

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean: Orlean’s been a staff writer on The New Yorker for over twenty-five years, which explains why this book reads so much like an extended New Yorker article (and even makes reference to one that I’ve found haunting since first reading it, about maybe-falsely-convicted-of-arson Cameron Todd Willingham). That’s not necessarily bad, but The Library Book tries to do a lot simultaneously: provide a history of the LA Public Library, be a series of profiles on the people who work there now, and investigate the fire that destroyed half the collection in 1986. It’s engaging, but its sense of purpose often falters.

Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett: Managed to completely forget that I read this over the weekend, which isn’t to say it’s unmemorable. The prose is intentionally limited (mostly); to emphasize or intensify, a word is repeated (so we get a lot of “cold cold” and “big big”). It’s Beckett’s reflection of a society that has developed on an exoplanet and descended from only two people, a criminal who crashlanded a stolen ship there and the policewoman who followed him and chose to remain on the planet instead of facing probable death in an attempt to return to Earth. Theologically and sociologically, Beckett’s created something fascinating, but the emphasis on innate masculine innovativeness and drive leaves a slightly unpleasant aftertaste.

Lanny, by Max Porter: I’m not disputing that Porter writes well. His first novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, was a linguistic knockout, and an emotional one as a direct result of that expressiveness. Lanny convinces me a little bit less–it’s a story about a strange, ethereal boy whose parents have moved the family to a commuter village in the Home Counties, and who catches the attention of the village’s resident guardian spirit/Green Man archetype, known in legend as Dead Papa Toothwort. The central section, driven by a frantic search for missing Lanny, is gripping and terrifying reading, but I’m not sure what the ultimate purpose or thesis of the book is. The countryside is brutal and weird? Strange children usually turn out fine?

Currently reading: I’m about to start Nick Coleman’s Voices, a compilation of essays about famous musicians (Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger and my beloved Joni Mitchell among them).

A Monthly Book, #2: The Five

The first thing to know about The Five is that it is a book defined by its approach; the second thing is that the approach is long overdue. The facts are these: in the late summer and autumn of 1888, from the end of August to November, five women were murdered in London’s Whitechapel neighbourhood. They appeared to have been killed in the same way, and presumably by the same person. That person was never caught, but the persona that solidified around him (though, of course, we can’t know for sure that he was a him) goes by the name “Jack the Ripper”. Victorian society and 21st-century society both possess an unhealthy obsession with the sickening minutiae of Jack’s crimes–the way in which he physically mutilated the women he killed, and the almost supernatural ease with which he seemed to vanish into the gas-lit, fog-bound metropolis. Of the people he murdered, the most that any story about them seems to agree on is that they were sex workers. That “fact” (which is not true) has obscured both the actual lives they lived, and the reality of their murders: that they were not nubile doxies hanging about on street corners with artfully tousled Helena Bonham-Carter hair, but rather were overwhelmingly middle-aged, alcoholic, homeless women whose primary failing was to have been left bereft, in one way or another, of the male protection without which a nineteenth-century woman was considered functionally worthless.

Hallie Rubenhold is redressing the balance. The Five is a group biography; each of the women considered “canonical” victims of the Ripper murders is given a section of her own, which consists of three to four chapters that trace her life history from birth to the night she died. The most deliberate structural choice in the book is that Rubenhold never describes a murder. She’s writing with an agenda about which she is not remotely ashamed: women who are murdered are more than the story of their deaths. Starting with what can be determined about each woman’s early life–her parents, her place of birth, her place in the social hierarchy–she uses a sometimes scanty primary source record, bolstered with intelligently chosen secondary sources that provide contextual information about the experience of working-class life in late nineteenth-century England. Inevitably, she is forced to engage in a certain amount of speculation: in the absence of CCTV or diaries from the women themselves, it’s often difficult to know why they moved house, for instance, or whether the name that appears in parish records is the right one. But she has an excellent capacity for triangulation: she frequently uses that aforementioned historical context in conjunction with a primary source to arrive at a conclusion of what is overwhelmingly likely about a particular woman’s life, and it is convincing.

The most patently false “fact” about the canonical five is that they were all sex workers (or, as Rubenhold writes throughout the book, “prostitutes”; I assume this is for historical continuity and she is using the word as it was deployed in police reports). There is no evidence that four out of the five women were professional sellers of sex. (The fifth, Mary Jane Kelly, who did work both in a brothel and freelance, is the one about whom we know the least.) However, every single one of them is known to have struggled with alcohol addiction. Mostly, drinking problems and the resultant financial strain were responsible for the implosion of their marriages or common-law relationships. They were all–again, except for Mary Jane Kelly–murdered outside, in the middle of the night. The unbearably sad conclusion is that their killer was targeting, not youthful sex workers who were lying down to ply their trade, but middle-aged homeless women who were lying down because they were asleep. Rubenhold makes it terribly clear that being a woman “outside” conventional societal roles–a woman separated from her husband or widowed, an addict, a beggar–was conflated, often fatally, with being a woman of loose morals. No distinction was made between the broken and the fallen. Not only is The Five a lucid and frankly addictive group biography (the pages really do turn themselves); it also makes painfully clear that a country whose social welfare programs are limited to the application of shame, humiliation, and a rigid code of so-called morality is not a country anyone ought to wish to return to. (I, like Rubenhold, will leave you to infer the contemporary political resonance.)

It is, in short, an excellent book as well as a much-needed one: it mingles true crime and well-researched history with narrative energy and Rubenhold’s ever-present passion for her subject. It’s going to do well without my help, but you really should read it.

Reading Diary: Feb. 5-Feb. 11

The Warlow Experiment, by Alix Nathan: Nathan’s novel is based on a true story: in 1793, a Mr. Powyss offered £50 a year for life to any man who would undertake to live in solitary confinement underground for seven years, without cutting his nails, hair, or beard, keeping a journal of his thoughts. The advertisement was answered by one man, a labourer with a wife and a large number of children. Nathan skillfully integrates the class upheaval occurring in England at the time, and the voice of John Warlow, the semi-literate ploughman who takes up the offer, is poignantly and viscerally rendered. Out in July and not to be missed.

In the Full Light of the Sun, by Clare Clark: Clark’s enormous but addictive new novel fictionalizes an art-world scandal that rocked 1930s Berlin regarding the authenticity (or not) of several dozen recently discovered Van Gogh paintings. Clark’s three point-of-view characters are Emmeline, an aspiring young artist; Julius, an art historian whose reputation is on the line; and Frank, a Jewish defense lawyer. The plot is over-complicated–there are too many names to remember and not enough clarity regarding the details of the fraud–but Clark’s most memorable character, the charismatic and manipulative art dealer Matthias Rachmann, is a real success.

Currently reading: A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, by Siri Hustvedt (a brilliant collection of essays on the mind-body problem, art, and gender relations; she’s one of the most intelligent writers I know), and Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett (which makes an interesting counter-read to the Hustvedt, given that it’s a Clarke Award-winning science fiction planetary romance/exploration drama which also partakes of alarming gender essentialism).

Reading Diary: Jan 29-Feb. 4

A Time to Keep Silence, by Patrick Leigh Fermor: A very short (95 pages) collection of three essays about monasteries and the monastic life. Leigh Fermor stayed at St Wandrille, Solesmes and La Grande Trappe, as well as spending time looking at the ruins of the Cappadocian rock monasteries. The first two essays, set in the three French foundations, are the strongest, describing what it’s like to live in solitude for a spiritual purpose; though Leigh Fermor has no faith, he acclimatizes to the silence and misses it when he returns to the world. If your mind needs calming, these pieces may help.

The Wolf Border, by Sarah Hall: There are people who might say, I suppose, that the final quarter of this book is too slow, or that Hall’s writing about the Lake District seasons, weather and light are too deliberate and descriptive, but I’m never going to be one of those people, because I think she writes like a dream and this is one of my favourite books of all time. I also think that here, some of her previous thematic interests–motherhood, the cycle of birth and death, the natural world and how humans live both in- and outside of it–coalesce in their most sophisticated form yet. An excellent book to read if you need reminding of how well it is possible to write.

I must be living twice: new and selected poems, by Eileen Myles: Myles’s poetry is quite different from Rich’s; her lines are short and jagged, often only three or four words each. Her style of thought is discursive: I often feel lost, reading her, until a vivid observation or connection jumps out. “Peanut Butter” is the poem that brought me to Myles, but the sweary dismissiveness of “On the Death of Robert Lowell” makes me laugh; “Yellow Tulips” is unashamedly happy; the opening of “Mal Maison” is devastating. “And Then the Weather Arrives” is maybe peak Myles: it feels like it’s written in a sort of personal code, but you understand the emotions, if not the details.

What I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt: A totally brilliant book, following the friendship between two men–painter Bill and art historian Leo–and the intertwining of the lives of their families, including Leo’s wife, Bill’s first and second wives, and their two sons: Leo’s Matthew, and Bill’s Mark. The first half of the book, roughly, deals with the older generation, and the second half with the younger; without any spoilers, Matthew and Mark’s lives turn out very differently. Hustvedt excels at describing the destructive self-delusion of a certain kind of art world denizen. The novel is both intellectual and terrifying; I found it hard to sleep after finishing it and know it’ll continue to haunt me.

The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck: The next installment in my quest for more poetry. Someone recommended Gluck to me years ago, but it’s taken me this long to read her. I am not sure that I grasp or love her yet. There’s passion in these poems, but it feels like the highly personal and focused passion of a nun; not that it’s anti- or asexual, but that it insists upon the numinous. Does that sound pretentious? It shouldn’t; most of the poems are quite explicitly earthbound, being either from the point of view of a plant or flower (metaphors, I think, for human life), or from a higher point of view that is still occupying itself with earthly things. Curious and transcendent.

Currently reading: I’ve just finished Alix Nathan’s forthcoming The Warlow Experiment.