I feel like I’ve had a long period recently of reading books that were firmly located on the okay-to-meh end of the scale. Not bad books, just books that didn’t quite work for me. Then, after waiting for ages for a great book to come along, three came all at once. Well, four, if I’m completely accurate. This is a relief. Obviously I’ve had reading slumps before but rarely one that was quite as long.
I had one straight DNF – Small Miracles by Anne Booth, which was the book about nuns winning the lottery. When I heard the premise, I conferred on the novel a ton of irony and edge that the book itself, alas, does not have. I thought it would be funny and sharp and have things to say about spirituality and commerce and luck. Well, in all fairness it may have said those things in the pages I didn’t read, and let’s face it, I only lasted a few chapters. It was just told too straight and saccharine for my taste; clearly a sweet book, charming and probably very poignant. Just not my cup of tea.
At the other end of the scale was Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler. I very much enjoyed this novel because it was written by Anne Tyler, whose books since The Accidental Tourist have encapsulated my ideal of reading joy. Her prose is unassuming, subtle, insightful, amusing, deeply realistic, completely unpretentious. You are simply inside her world and it feels like the greatest solace to be there, and she makes it all seem so easy and natural that I think she is underestimated a great deal. Anyway, this novel concerns 60-year-old school teacher, Liam Pennywell, who kicks off the story by being made redundant. He accepts this – ‘It wasn’t such a good job, anyhow’ – and downsizes into a new apartment. Liam has lost two wives, one to death, the other to divorce, and his relationships with his ex, Barbara, and his three daughters are all a bit sketchy. He’s kind of given up on life; on the possibility of thrill and novelty, and on his own potential to live intensely. Anne Tyler writes these kind of male characters so very well. He’s gently resigned, embracing the quietude of the banal, accepting a life devoid of meaning and purpose as his inevitable lot, without any performative self-pity. And then, he wakes up in the hospital having suffered a concussion. It turns out that he was burgled in his new apartment and injured when the thief attacked him. Liam is utterly bewildered because he has no memory of the event whatsoever, and this lacuna becomes intolerable to him. The urge to find out what happened takes him onto an entirely unexpected path in life, and one that will ultimately heal more than just a bump on the head. I did love this – it was a reread and I knew I would enjoy it. But – and this is a delicate but, not a forceful one – Tyler has written better novels. A less than stellar Anne Tyler remains better than most books.
In between these two sits Miranda France’s memoir, The Writing School. Now this is tricky to write about because there was a great deal that I did very much like. It’s a memoir that weaves two strands together: one is a narrative nonfiction account (I presume with composite characters) of a week spent teaching at a writing school that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire. The other strand is straightforward memoir, detailing her upbringing and focusing on the death of her older brother by suicide. For me, these two strands fought each other. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to make of their interweaving, and this was not helped by France’s knowing but confusing nods in the writing school sections towards the art of memoir – the difficult ethics of it, the impossibility of ever telling ‘the truth’, and so on. These discussions seemed to undercut her personal narrative, and yet they challenged it in an entirely inconsequential way. I suppose you could say that one strand details her private life, the other her work life, as she also tells us about her writer-in-residence post at a London hospital, which had a hot-desking policy from hell. But frankly what it felt like to me was that she didn’t have enough material for a whole book on either aspect of her life, and so they were thrown in together with the rough edges deemed ‘literary’. It was a shame as France is a very good writer and she had some fascinating things to say about writing. But I really needed more depth in the portraits she was painting – of her family and of her students on the course – and more connection between the elements of the book.
And then my reading began to pick up. Now, I’m not going to talk here about the books I’m enjoying because I haven’t finished them yet (don’t want to jinx it) and I will probably review them properly in any case. But what I will just add here are the possible novellas I could read this month. I’d like to make some good choices and keep on the happy wave I’m currently coasting. Sifting through my shelves resulted in the following small pile:
I’ve been dithering over these for ages. I’m most in the mood to read The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner and Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald – all of which would be rereads! I could do this, of course, but there are a lot of unread books on my shelves. I’m keen to read Heatwave by Victor Jestin as it comes highly recommended, and I’d like to read the Turgenev as I’ve read so few books by Russian authors. But given my history lately, is it enough motivation?
Anyway, the inevitable consequence of dithering happened, and I came up with a whole new pile of possible books.
Of these I became most excited about reading the Douglas Bruton – and then I flicked through it and discovered that cancer was a feature of the narrative. I’m still a bit tender about that and have avoided books on the topic. I could also add to the above books Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which I’ve been meaning to read all year and Rachel Cusk’s Second Place. They’re both on the Kindle. I really need to stop adding possible novellas to the list and just plump for one.
Why is it so hard to choose what to read sometimes?