Four Books in Four Days

Not masterpieces, but a full evening’s interest and some entertainment in each one.

Here’s what it feels like.

You pick up a book, read a page. It’s okay. Enough to make you want to keep going. Then you read the next page, and perhaps by the end of that second page, you know. You’ve got that feeling – this will be my world for the next few hours.

And you settle in.

I do tend to gobble up books, to binge-read. Ever since I was a child, that’s the way it’s been. Oh, many books don’t lend themselves to that – I do love Trollope, I’ve spent days immersed in a single Collins novel – but it’s really the same feeling – these will be my people for now.

Love them or hate them or be puzzled by them – these will be my people.

A few television shows give that sense, as well, but right now, there’s nothing, and even more importantly, right now, for some reason, I don’t want to be immersed in a screen world of moving figures for hours at a time. Perhaps it’s because it’s summer, and I do most of my evening reading outside, and to be sitting indoors strikes me as somehow wrong. But perhaps it’s also because right now, in almost every area of public life, I feel the pressure of manipulating, narrative-setting forces trying like mad to get me to believe things that are patently untrue and to behave in a certain acceptable way and to just….go along with the screenplay.

A narrative on a screen simply reinforces that feeling, while a book – as carefully and purposefully constructed as it is, as immersive as it is intended to by the author is still an engagement between me and just one person, an engagement that affords me a great deal of inner freedom to imagine and mentally wander in between the lines, even to argue.

So I read four books in four days. Four nights really, sitting outside on my front porch, citronella candle burning at my side, insects and frogs singing from the trees, kids swinging in and out of the area as their wanderings allow.

Morningside Heights – the worst of the bunch. Yes, I had that feeling at the beginning of acceptance, of a willingness and even interest in entering this world, but after those first few chapters, the promise fell apart. I kept reading, mostly because I was interested in the fate of a couple of the characters, and it was a fast read – what’s another hour? – and also for technical purposes – this is a widely praised novel published this year – what does that mean? What are people writing about and how and what are they being praised for?

In other words – if this guy can do it, surely I can.

It’s the story of a professor afflicted by early Alzheimer’s. He’s married, has an adult daughter with his current wife and a son from a very brief previous marriage to a woman who took the kid off on her own hippie-ish wanderings, and who returned him to his father when the kid was in his teens. It didn’t go well.

There was a paint-by-numbers superficiality about this book. There was very little compassion, really – it seemed to be all about change, but change without any kind of growth, particularly growth of compassion or growth of insight into the human condition. Change without much purpose.

So, no questions like: if an adult human life can end this way, what does this mean about life period? What’s the value of our strivings and achievements if this is how we end up? And what are my responsibilities to those who need me?

None of those questions were addressed, and so the impact, to me at least, was a superficial one.

Unsettled Ground – also plucked from the “new releases” shelf. This was a very interesting book – flawed in some ways, and certainly not cheerful, but I enjoyed it enough to immediately read another of this author’s – Claire Fuller.

Jeanie and Jules are 51-year old twins who live in a very basic way with their mother, Dot, in a rented cottage (this is England), growing fruits and vegetables, keeping chickens and making music. Dot suddenly dies, so what happens next? There are secrets – some of which are rather obvious from the beginning, but others which are surprising.

There’s a gradual, but steady descent, and the depictions of the level of poverty that the two must live in for a time are as painful as anything I’ve ever read. Quite vivid and sad and frustrating. But then – through another tragedy, light appears, as it does.

The book is essentially about deception and truth, and how constrained we can be by family myths and, more importantly, family narratives – here quite explicitly, lies.

It’s the journey of adulthood, really, here laid out in dramatic, almost extreme terms.

It had somewhat of a mythic quality, as if there’s no way these people could be living this way in the present day, so separated from technology, so close to the edge, but that just encourages the hard work of finding common ground. It’s not instantly relatable, so after some hard work and thought and confrontation with the familiar via the strange, the commonality of the story is stronger than it might be if their world were exactly like ours.

So, as I said, my appreciation of this book led me to check out two others – Bitter Orange came next, and that was Sunday night’s reading. I enjoyed this one two, but less than Unsettled Ground. It had a more mannered feel, with less to hang onto in the strangeness.

Fuller likes and knows a lot about gardens and houses, and she brings this into her work. In Bitter Orange, we’re at a higher level than we were in the hardscrabble world of Unsettled Ground– the property of an old, dilapidated mansion, bought by an American who’s hired a woman named Frances to evaluate the garden “follies” (new term to me) – the architectural features like bridges and such – and Peter, who has come with his wife Cara to inventory the contents of the home. It’s 1969, and the home had been largely unlived in since it had been used to house troops during World War II.

Again, there are secrets, and it’s a more traditional mystery than Unsettled Ground. The secrets were less artfully woven into the narrative – it felt more like a connect-the-dots effort than the more organic Unsettled Ground, but I still enjoyed it.

Both novels feature at their center young women who’ve been dominated by their recently deceased mothers, one having lived through that experience with more awareness of what was going on than the other. But the theme is still strong: adult women of limited intellectual or mental capacity who spent their whole lives up to the point we meet them dominated by a mother’s issues.

It’s a theme that many of us live with. Interesting to see it dramatized in two successive books by the same author.

I began the third by Fuller that I’d checked out – Swimming Lessons – and within a page, lost interest. Perhaps another time.

And with no more books checked off, it was over to the digital library. What did I feel like reading? Some short, sharp, noir – that’s what. How about The Postman Always Rings Twice, which I’d never read and clocked in at 130 pages via the archive.org edition?

Great choice, if I do say so myself.

It should go without saying: dark, gritty and somehow both frank and allusive. People are dissatisfied with their choices, which leads to questionable choices, which lead to apparent success, which leads to a catastrophic, karmic fall.

Cain was a lapsed Catholic (something I read indicated he lost his faith at the age of 13, when he realized that his “confesssions” were fabricated just to have something to say, and that the priest probably knew it. A fascinating note, considering the role of confessions, both real and fake, in his work, especially this one.) – but of course you can really only be so lapsed, especially if you are an artist trying to say something real and true.

For in Postman, if there’s anything, there’s a landscape of cosmic justice, which isn’t just meted out from on high – which it is – but is also felt in the bones of crucial characters. No, I didn’t do the thing for which I’m being punished, but I do deserve punishment, yes. So here I am.

But there’s also this, which surprised me. At the very end, before everything really goes to hell for everyone who’s left standing, there’s a glimpse of hope – real hope. A character expresses a conviction that there’s a way out of this, that it can be forgiven and put behind them, and something good could be made from the rest of their days. And what leads to this epiphany? A pregnancy, of course. There had been death, and it was their fault, but now there’s a baby and maybe…hope?

Welp, not for long. Of course.

“We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.”