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The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble (William Morrow, 1965)

I believe I first read this book in 1979, during my first year at Hamilton College, in Elaine Hansen’s Modern Women Writers class.  We also read (I think) Jerusalem The Golden, A Summer Bird Cage,  The Millstone, and The Waterfall (along with Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood) and I remember loving these early Drabble novels and admiring them for their focus on the intimate lives of young women during a time when women’s lives were changing.  A few weeks ago, when I emptied my bookshelves in order to install new floor-to-ceiling shelves, The Garrick Year ended up on top of one of the many piles I had placed on the floor, and so when I was looking for a book to read, there it was, and I thought it would be interesting to read it again 40 years later.

It was interesting: this is Drabble’s second novel, (following A Summer Bird Cage).  It’s the story of Emma, a bright and beautiful woman who is married to a charismatic and sexy Welsh actor, David.  They have two children: Flora, who’s 3 or 4 years old, and Joe, who is a baby.  The Garrick Year takes place during the spring and summer in an early ’60s year, and is mostly set in Hereford, a small town near the Welsh border where an eccentric American woman has funded a new regional theatre, and David is hired as one of the company that will inaugurate the theatre with a season of three plays presented in repertory.

So Emma, David, and the children leave London (where Emma had just been offered a fabulous job as a news reader on TV, which the move requires she sacrifices) for Hereford, where they rent a house in the village.  Emma begins an affair with the director of the company, an older, rather pompous gentleman, who intrigues Emma but whom she doesn’t find sexy, so she and her lover spend most of their time together motoring around the countryside in his Jaguar and having meals in restaurants, where Emma habitually orders several appetizers rather than an entree, flirting with him but not encouraging his physical advances.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, David is having an affair with Sophie Brent, the youngest and least talented actor in the company, but the most beautiful.

Emma is a smart and engaging narrator, but she isn’t very sympathetic.  She’s selfish, entitled, rude, lazy, and her behavior with the director (what’s his name?  Farquhar or some other pretentious English surname) becomes tiresome and boring.  So there isn’t much narrative momentum in the middle third of the book, and I felt my interest steadily declining.  As if sensing this, in the book’s final third, Drabble suddenly overcompensates for the lack of action heretofore with a plane crash, a near drowning, and a car accident, all of which shock the plot into concluding rather hurriedly and easily.

But in the last few pages, as Emma looks back over the events of the summer and draws conclusions about her own and other’s behavior, the writing takes on a complexity and polish that transcends the floundering narrative and the book ends on a rich and wise grace note, which is, I think, indicative of the complexity, beauty, and wisdom of the books Drabble would soon write: The Needle’s Eye, Jerusalem the Golden, The Waterfall.

Paul Newman reads Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year

Will Warburton by George Gissing (Hogarth, 1985)

This was Gissing’s final novel, written when he was dying and published in 1905, two years after his death (at 46) in 1903. 

Will Warburton, a young man from a good but modest family, runs a sugar exporting company with his friend and business partner Godfrey Sherwood, but when a better business opportunity comes along he invests all of his, and his family’s (his mother’s and sister’s) fortune in it, only to lose everything when Sherwood embezzles the funds and gambles them all away.

Will is forced to start work as a grocer and loses all his social respectability and class status.  He is scorned by those who once would have respected and welcomed him, and is considered “common” and unworthy of all that was previously his social due.  He works hard and honestly at his new trade and treats people with kindness and generosity, and is (somewhat unbelievably) able to keep his reduced circumstances a secret from his mother and sister and close friends, but is disheartened and exhausted by living a false life.  He loses a woman he thinks he loves when his true identity is revealed, and finds himself in love with a better woman who loves him for who he is rather than what he does.

Will Warburton is a novel about class and its effect on social relationships and romance in English society at the turn of the previous century.  Will is a wonderfully sympathetic and admirable character: honest, brave, generous to a fault, good-humored, faithful, and hard-working, and the characters that surround him are varied and all vividly evoked, and I enjoyed reading this novel very much.  Gissing has an engagingly straightforward style that is a pleasure to read.

The Reef  by Edith Wharton (Everyman’s Library, Knopf)

I enjoyed reading this (perhaps) minor novel of Wharton’s, first published in 1912.  It’s a novel of compact and limited scope, focussing on four characters who become connected in a complex menage a quartre.

George Darrow, an American diplomat stationed in England, is reunited with Anna Leath.  They loved each other in their youth, but Anna married a boring half-French, half-American man who conveniently died before boring her to death with his collection of snuff boxes.  Anna returns to France where she lives with her daughter and mother-in-law, an imperious American who married a French nobleman.  Darrow journeys to France to visit Anna but she abruptly and inexplicably cancels their rendezvous, and he takes up with Sophie Viner, a charismatic and charming young woman he meets on the ferry who is fleeing to Paris to pursue a life on the stage after losing her job as a private secretary and companion to an odious English woman.  Sophie and George spend a week together in Paris, and charm each other.  George’s interest is mostly avuncular, but they do end up sleeping together, before parting for what they believe will be for good.

But through a twist of fate (or narrative contrivance), Sophie gets hired as Anna’s daughter’s governess and becomes engaged to Anna’s step-son, Owen.  When George arrives at Anna’s chateau to ask her to marry him, he encounters Sophie and a crisis ensues.  George and Anna weather the storm, but Sophie and Owen do not.

Like Ethan Frome, this seemed more like a chamber piece — the cast is few and the scope is small.  But within these confines the book succeeds as an interesting and engaging novel that adroitly examines the lingering effects of romance past — effects that linger more indelibly (and damagingly) for women than for men.

 

Kitty by Warwick Deeping (Knopf, 1927)

I enjoyed reading this book very much, although my opinion of it sank lower and lower as I read more and more.  It’s not a terrible book by any means — just not very well-written and melodramatically conceived and executed.  But it is a good, engaging story with a large collection of vivid and colorful characters.  So a good read on a purely narrative level.  I can understand why Deeping was a popular author in his time (this book belonged to my grandmother, who also had a few other Deepings in her library).

Kitty is the story of the risky courtship and troubled marriage of two young English people of slightly but irrevocably different classes.  Kitty is 24 — small, pretty, charming.  She lives with her mother and sister above the tobacco shop they own and successfully run in London.  Her mother, “Mrs Sarah,” was married to a doctor but has been widowed for quite some time, and is wealthy and independent, merry and life-loving.  She is proud of her two beautiful and sensible daughters.

Alex is the only son of Mrs St. George, a widowed upper-class woman who has a house in both the town and the country.  She is a hateful person: cold, mean, humorless, and vindictive.  When Alex meets Kitty a few days before he is to be sent to fight in France (it’s 1918) and falls in love with her, he marries her without telling his mother, because he knows she will not approve.  He’s right — she doesn’t, and when she learns of her son’s marriage she tries everything possible to destroy it.  She hires a lawyer and personal investigator and lying, tells her son (who’s still in France) that she has proof that Kitty is a prostitute and that the tobacco shop is really a brothel.  Alex receives this news the day before he is wounded in battle.  He suffers both paraplegia and amnesia and returns to England and his mother’s powerful and unyielding clutch.  Mrs St. George foibles any attempt Alex and Kitty make to communicate or reunite, and Kitty, despairing, decides she must establish a home to which she can bring and care for her paralyzed, addled-brained husband.

And so with the help of her formidable mother, Kitty buys an inn/shop/boatyard on the Thames outside of London and sets about restoring it and creating a tea and dance hall for weekend trippers.  She finally manages to cleverly kidnap Alex and settle him in their new home, where, despite, regaining his identity and memory, he becomes terribly depressed because he feels useless.  Kitty gives him a stiff talking-to and tells him to buck up, and he learns that although he is unable to walk, he is capable of many tasks (including interior decorating).  Together Kitty and Alex make a success of their establishment.  Kitty decides that a shock to his system may restore her husband’s mobility so she capsizes a punt and pretends to be drowning, whereupon Alex leaps out of his wheelchair and rescues her.  Mrs St. George is summoned to come and behold the miracle that Kitty has performed, but her enmity has caused her to wither and her health to fail.  She arrives and is reunited with her restored son, but is it too late to make amends?

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm (Knopf, 1994)

This is a brilliant and fascinating book that attempts to untangle the webs of controversy and conflict surrounding the many biographies of Sylvia Plath, which uses Anne Steveson’s biography, Bitter Fame, as a focal point.  That biography, which was guided, controlled, and perhaps even co-written by Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister and agent for the Plath estate (Ted is the executor) reverses the perspective of earlier biographies by being sympathetic to Ted and critical of Plath.  For this reason it was condemned upon publication and Stevenson was considered a literary pariah.

Malcolm interviews all the parties involved (except Ted):  Stevenson, Olwyn Hughes, the previous biographers and memorists, and in sifting through all this material brilliantly reveals the perils and pitfalls of writing a biography,  questioning the purpose and worth of what she concludes is an impossible, inherently flawed, and foul genre. 

The book moves circuitously through its material, following tangents so assiduously that the main track is frequently and lengthily abandoned.  Reading the book is like swirling around in a big pot of flavorful stew that is constantly being stirred.  This sacrifice of clarity (and chronology) may frustrate a reader, who longs for the mess to be cleaned up rather than enhanced, but ultimately it feels like the best form for a book about the impossibility of objectivity to take.

Malcolm has a tendency to offer some of her opinions and interpretations as facts, although she is up front about his biases and sympathies.  The Hughes siblings seems to want to have their cake and eat it too, and I wished Malcolm had looked harder and more critically at their hypocrisy along with everyone else’s.

Loving by Henry Green (Anchor, 1953)

I read this book many years ago, in college, I believe, and remember I didn’t quite know what to make of it.  Well, reading it again 40 years later hasn’t changed my response — I still find it somewhat maddening and inscrutable.

Loving is set in a castle in Ireland during WWII, and mostly concerns the servants, all English (except for Paddy, the almost sub-human “lamp” man) who are employed by Mrs. Tarrant, of Anglo-Irish gentry.  She lives in the castle with her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack.  Mrs. Tarrant’s son Jack is in the army but spends quite a bit of time on leave in London or at  home in Ireland.

The main character is Raunce, who ascends to being the butler at the beginning of the book, when Eldon, the ancient former butler, dies.  Raunce is a scoundrel — dishonest and ambitious, but quite charming despite his deficient character.  He is in love with Edith, one of the two maids (the other is Kate) who toil under the watchful eye of the sanctimonious housekeeper, the lonely spinster Miss Agatha Burch.  There’s also an alcoholic and paranoid cook, Mrs. Welch, and two kitchen maids, Alice and Jane, a very young footman named Albert, and Miss Swift, the nanny, who spends most of the book on her deathbed.

Green, as always, depends almost entirely on dialogue to tell his story, and he brilliantly captures the disparate voices of all these people, both above and below stairs.  He has a pitiless eye for detail and presents his characters like specimens on a microscope slide.  This makes for a smart and amusing read, but the narrative remove and lack of sympathy for all the characters leaves the reader with a bitter taste.  And the end of the book seems truly perverse: Raunce’s health fails; he seems to be dying.  Green brings us to a place of tenderness and pathos, and then punishes us with a final sentence that bullies us for caring.

Lapsing by Jill Patton Walsh (St. Martin’s, 1987)

This is a novel about a young English woman named Tessa.  Tessa is a devout Catholic and most of the novel centers around her years in Oxford (evoked in great detail) in the early 1960s, where she studies literature and is a member of a Catholic students group led by Father Theodore, a brilliant, beautiful, and charismatic mathematician/priest, who Tessa falls (platonically, she thinks) in love with.  She misguidedly marries Ben, a fellow Catholic student, so that they can provide a home for Father Theodore, but of course this doomed menage self-destructs and in what seems to be a hastily appended flash-forward, we learn that Tessa has found a new life as a fabric artist in the United States.

Tessa is a naive and sometimes unbelievably clueless character, but Patton Walsh is a good and smart writer who elevates this story above the dubious plot and makes it into an interesting exploration of faith and love. 

 

A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler; translated by Charlotte Collins (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2016)

I bought this book for $1 at the Dollar Tree because it looked interesting — a short novel, originally published in Germany, about a solitary rural man’s life throughout much of the 20th century.  It was an “international bestseller” and published by FSG. 

Although it spans nearly eight decades, at only 150 pages, it’s a glancing portrait, but it seems a deep one, by virtue of its empathy and vivid recreation of important moments from Egger’s life.  Orphaned as as small boy, he is raised by his tyrannical uncle, a farmer, without love.  He is brutally beaten and become independent as soon as he grows strong enough to defend himself.  He lives alone and works at physically taxing odd jobs until he meets Maria, a waitress at the local village inn.  When he marries her he begins working for a company that builds cable-cars and ski-lifts in the mountain valleys.  Maria is killed and their humble home is destroyed in an avalanche, and he spends eight years in a Russian prison camp during and after the war.  When he finally returns to his village in 1951, the world has changed.  He lives alone in rooms or mountain shacks and supports himself by guiding tourists through the surrounding mountains.  

A Whole Life is a quiet, sad, but lovely book about the solitary life of a thwarted yet decent man.  Curious and memorable.

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha (Tin House, 2020)

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a big, ambitious New York City novel — rather similar in scope and tone to Bonfire of the Vanities (I imagine).  Its wealthy and privileged characters are well-developed and interesting, and the book has no post-modern gloss or attitude — the rich Trollopian narrative is conventionally presented and offers all the many satisfactions of 19th-century novels.

It takes place over about six months in 2009 — after the crash of 2008 — and seamlessly combines the worlds of high-finance, baseball, and journalism.  Beha writes with a confident authority about all these things and whatever research he did is unobtrusively incorporated into this very accomplished and enjoyable book.

Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (Richard Bentley and Son, 1893)

I came across a reference to Rhoda Broughton in a novel I recently read — or perhaps it was the biography of Beverly Nichols?  It was mentioned as being seen on a character’s book shelf and was, I believe, an indication of their being middle-brow.  So I ordered two of her books — Nancy and Not Wisely but Too Well.

Although this book has problems with pacing and sustainability, I enjoyed reading it and thought it was interesting and engaging, and often quite witty and biting.  

Nancy is a 19-year-old girl who lives with her wealthy curmudgeonly father, her kind but ineffectual mother, Barbara and Ton-ton, her older and younger sisters, and Algy, Pratt, and Bobby, her three charming and high-spirited brothers.  Her father’s childhood friend Sir Roger Tempest visits the family and he and Nancy fall surprisingly in love.  They marry, honeymoon in Dresden, where they meet Frank Musgrave, a young  neighbor of Roger’s who Nancy finds exasperating but strangely attractive.  She flirts with him by constantly sparring, not comprehending the mixed message she is sending.

Once back in England, Nancy and Roger return to his house and  are visited by the beautiful and angelic Barbara.  For  mercenary reasons Nancy attempts to instigate a romance between Barbara and Frank, but her intentions misfire and only succeed  in making Frank fall more deeply in love with her.  Meanwhile, Sir Roger goes to Antigua for eight months to restore proper business procedures at his sugarcane plantation, which had been (mis)managed by a scoundrel.

Nancy is 400 pages and the plot, which concerns the estrangement between Nancy and Sir Roger, does not make much sense and becomes tiresome.  But Nancy is an unusual character, and her present-tense, first-person narrative voice is charming.  The pithy and witty dialogue often put me in mind of Ivy Compton Burnett, while at other times the distinct shadow of Jane Austen falls across these pages.