Books of 2017 Part 3: 30-21

30) A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride

#BaileysPrizeWinners

This is an oddly written book, and I feel it's this weird phenomenon where post-Joyce Irish writers feel the need to push that narrative envelope further and further. However, like Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (My #12 book of 2013), I found this a far more engaging read than I did Ulysses (My number n book of n books I’ve ever read in my life, including Football, it’s a Funny Old Game by Kevin Keegan), despite the fact that it's more avant-garde in its prose than its predecessor from the get-go. Essentially a long distracted stream of consciousness, the prose is all in half-finished sentences, leaping from one idea to a bit of back-and-forth rapid dialogue to a long jolting train of thoughts. It's also unsettling in its subject matter, being the first person account of a young girl's growing up in a devout Irish catholic household and her sexual awakening and subsequent rebellion after she is statutorily raped by her uncle at age thirteen (I use the term statutorily since she consents, in as far as she is able to). The mental anguish that she goes through then and the obsession she has with this same uncle as she reaches adulthood means the stop-start prose, which is stuttering when calm, becomes very tumultuous when it's impassioned. The other part of the story, about her simultaneously reverent and protective attitude towards her older brother, with unspecified mental difficulties, forms the more tender but also more anguished part of the story. It's a little unsatisfying in that her only real revelation is how peripheral she is to her own life, and the conclusion of the story becomes the non-ending that we kind of hoped it wouldn't be - hoping instead for comeuppance for some of the insidious elements in her life. As a Baileys prize winner though, this is definitely one of the most satisfying, really centering around female identity and consciousness and presenting an unrelenting, warts-and-all depiction of the way men exploit it to their own ends while everybody makes allowances or excuses for it. This sits only at #30 because these are ultimately ranked on my subjective enjoyment, and while this is academically quite brilliant, it’s a tough, unpleasant and clumsy read.

29) The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan

#ClassicsIShouldRead

Good book. I enjoyed it particularly as someone married to a Chinese immigrant, in that I recognised a lot of the cultural norms and the philosophy that Tan explores in this east-meets-west, past-meets-present fractured narrative. I found I digested it far more as a collection of loosely-related short stories rather than a novel, and in a similar way to Infinite Jest (nah, it's not as good) I could enjoy them all without needing all the interconnections. Mind you, I found it simply the sum of its parts/stories, without getting a greater synthesis of them all which I felt was available. Late in the book, I realised the reason I wasn't getting more, and wasn't remembering the last part of the previous story/narrative part from each character was basically that they not only didn't start from where the previous part left off (even idea-wise) but they often didn't finish with a narrative event or anything that was memorable, but the final 'event' would be followed by some kind of philosophical musing or reflection. It ultimately isn't necessary but I feel I missed out on something because the parts didn't thread and flow into each other to me. Obviously as a Simpsons obsessive too, I had Lisa’s quote "it really showed me how the mother-daughter bond can triumph over adversity" in my head the whole time, and as with a lot of cultural references in the Simpsons, it – and Tan’s awkward dismissal of this reading - is a genuinely quality joke, because while it's a fairly obvious takeout, it's also a very simplistic reading of the book, and there's enough ambivalence in a lot of the mother-daughter relationships that it genuinely could have been the opposite of Tan's intention if you apply such a reading. It was definitely a rewarding and engaging read, but it wasn't quite as rewarding as it should have been, or seems to be for most people.

28) My Ántonia – Willa Cather

#ClassicsIShouldRead

So two things I kind of knew going into this book: one, Americans worship this book; it's a staple on every US high school reading list, everybody's read it and esteems it and it would be top of mind for many people when asked ‘what is the great American novel’. The other is that people outside the US (eg. Jez) have either never heard of it or never read it. And I can see exactly why both of those are the case. Firstly, it's a very vivid and descriptive novel that takes place largely in regional Nebraska, and if you've never really seen anything romantic about a cornfield, it's unlikely you'll be instantly enraptured by this book. It definitely has a big sense of place, of community and of people, and has a lot to say about the pioneering spirit in early-20C America. So for an outsider from that milieu it definitely feels like a quaint and perhaps over-romantic eulogy for a bygone time and place. It also feels to me very mild and sentimental even while not shying away from heavy themes like suicide, broken dreams, regret and guilt. The culture clash between the European migrants and the American-born characters is washed with this hazy cornfield glow that to my eyes makes America out to be far more prosperous and inviting than reality would really spell out. But I get it, and I get why people appreciate it because it celebrates difference as much as it celebrates togetherness, and the sentimentality that is unavoidable is also enriched by Cather's striking visual language that doesn't seem excessively wordy or florid. It's to me completely understandable that people would reread and cherish this book but can also ignore its efficacy and potency even after reading it. To me I appreciate the feelings it invokes but purely in an academic sense.

27) The Winter of our Discontent – John Steinbeck

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Interesting book. Definitely socially conscious like the Steinbeck classics, but it has a gentle sentimentality to it as well, that feels like a writer reconciling himself with the world later in life (this was written in 1961, a year before he won the Nobel). Ethan Hawley, our central character is a down on his luck grocery clerk who wishes he could provide a greater fortune to his wife and two kids. The story unfolds as he's presented with a variety of means to make that fortune and seems to eschew them all, and it's never fully clear what his motivations are. What's curious about the book is firstly historically: it's Steinbeck in a far more prosperous milieu than his greatest works; here people still struggle, but have so many more opportunities and options available so they’re struggling to make ends meet without being desperate. It's also curious from a moral point-of-view, because although the story ultimately celebrates honesty as a cardinal virtue, it's always very ambivalent as to how honest its characters are. In fact Ethan is often espoused by his fellows as being a model of honesty, and the more he (perhaps facetiously) protests that he isn't honest, the more they believe it. As absurd a comparison as it is, it reminded me a lot of American Psycho, in that Ethan in fact isn't honest, but in telling people forthrightly that he isn't, it somehow proves his honesty even more stridently (read Patrick Bateman trying to convince people that he is, in fact, a psychopath, and people disbelieving him the more he insists). I didn't love Ethan’s facetiousness or his sarcasm and he was perhaps a needlessly enigmatic figure. It's an enjoyable socially conscious story, not as impactful or memorable as Of Mice and Men or The Grapes of Wrath (my #26 book of 2013), but plenty to chew on and feel fairly optimistic about late in Steinbeck's career. It's writing of an America that's fixed itself after a depression and a couple of wars and is facing a brighter future.

26) The Bell – Iris Murdoch

#ReadAllTheMurdoch #AuthorsILikeOrAmIntriguedBy

Murdoch definitely has a way of dropping you right in the middle of the action. This, like The Sea, The Sea (my #1 book of 2014) is less chaotic and less difficult to grasp than some of her other character cornucopias, as this brings us into the action via a single character and her dilemma (running away from her husband, then reluctantly returning to him). The book takes place in a quasi-religious back-to-basics community, similar to the setting of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (my #33 book of 2016). The whole scenario of this religious community retreat is well established, and in typical Murdoch fashion unfolds with a cast of flawed and damaged characters. Here her focus is twofold: the nature of faith and how it manifests in people's psychology, as well as on the inner turmoil of the gay male in England during the early days of homosexuality’s demarginalisation. I feel like there's a bit of glibness in some of the character motivations, and some of them you only really get a sense of them through other's eyes as they are not really given focus. Some appear caricatured, and others seem unnecessarily malevolent - like Nick, who is a deeply troubled character but is seen mostly through Michael's personally skewed lens. I don't think it's her most effective novel, but it's classic stuff. Lots of farce and intrigue, tortured characters, infidelity and capriciousness. I'll never be bored reading Murdoch but I do feel like some of the personalities could have been more fully fleshed out to make it more striking and captivating, especially towards its bittersweet ending.

25) A Fair Maiden – Joyce Carol Oates

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Really quite a bizarre, surreal book from Oates. Something about the framing and the structure, of a chance encounter between a 16-year-old girl and an older man while she works her summer job as a nanny, put me in mind of McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers. This of course meant that the whole thing was for me imbued with this impending menace as the motivations of Marcus Kidder, the sexagenarian who forms a mysterious attachment to the 16-year-old Katya, remain elusive even as his forward advances become more overt and cavalier. This was the third Oates novel I've read (following the afore-mentioned I’ll Take You There at #40, and preceding Them at #48), and the third wildly different narrative style from her while the subject matter remains consistent. Here Katya is a broken, damaged kid from a rough family who wants nothing more than to be loved and treated well, so Oates emphasises her vulnerability more than any predatorial instincts in Kidder, and the menace comes more from seeing how reactive and pathetically subservient Katya becomes. Where the story goes though is a distinctly odd twist that is both dark and strangely reassuring relative to where it could have gone. I'm a bit ambivalent to some of the twists and turns but it's a very interesting read in the very affecting milieu that Oates occupies in the body politic.

24) Significant Others – Armistead Maupin

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After reasonably enjoying the fun but lightweight Tales of the City (my #27 book of 2015), this was another light, witty and personable account of San Francisco and the characters that inhabit it. Not really sure why I picked this up, did I need more Maupin in my life? No, but it's nice to have more. This, as a more expansive and singular narrative than Tales of the City takes on more of a soap operatic quality, various characters of various sexual orientations having a lot of curious and coincidental interconnections (someone asks at one point, referring to San Francisco, "how small is that town?"). The key crux of the story is somewhat Murdochean as three separate trips away - one by an older bloke to a men-only Bohemian retreat, one by a lesbian couple and their kids to a women-only outdoor festival and one between two gay guys and their straight friend just nearby the others - all intermingle in this series of escapades and hijinks. It's fun, it's light, it's surprisingly moving at times and ultimately just good company.

23) The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

#BaileysPrizeWinners

This was an interesting read, and an interesting reimagining of one of the most legendary stories: the Trojan war, told from the perspective of Patroclus, and focusing on the love affair between him and Achilles. I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of the legend so I consulted my resident expert Bec (whose expertise mainly takes the form of crying “I love Hector so much!!!!!”) throughout, to verify how many liberties Miller was taking with the source material, and from Bec’s takeout it sounds like the love affair was certainly, at least, a thing (sidenote apotropaic charm: I didn’t ask Bec “Hey did Achilles and Patroclus have a love affair?” but rather “Who is Patroclus, in the mythology around the Trojan war?” and she independently brought up the fact that he is at least rumoured to have been Achilles’ lover). Miller's reimagining of the legend slightly modernises the sentiment in a way, focusing on Patroclus as a commoner, and an exile, but through portraying Patroclus and Achilles' love being regarded as inferior or abnormal thereby invoking queer theory, and introducing what becomes a compelling exploration of heroism. The juxtaposition of Achilles - brave, swift, skilled and yet modest, generous, diplomatic, a man apart from others - and say Paris: vain, cowardly and, of course, very heterosexual, is the most interesting exploration in the book. I feel like as Miller labours the love story, and it starts to become more about fulfilment of prophecy, the will of the gods, about Achilles' refusal to engage Hector in combat (since in killing Hector he portends his own death), it becomes a bit over-simplistic. It's based on legend so it's already quite fatalistic and simplistic, but it did seem a trifle glib, especially given how hurriedly things get wrapped up following Patroclus' death. I feel there's a really interesting narrative of heroism that became a bit too liberal and even iconoclastic the more it got stretched, and I feel there were better ways to dovetail this and the legend at its conclusion.

22) Bullet Park – John Cheever

#ClassicsIShouldRead? #IGuess? #AuthorsIReadOnceAndDidntHate?

Wow, what a bonkers book. And what a bonkers way this was to end my year in reading. This felt for 80 per cent of it like a fairly safe, bland Cheever novel - as someone I discovered as a short fiction writer through the New Yorker fiction podcast (and subsequently read, in the form of Falconer, my #36 book of 2013) I do notice traces of the short story writer here. There is an overarching framing narrative of this community in Bullet Park - safe, neighbourly suburban Americana - but otherwise it tends to take the form of isolated but relevant anecdotes for the most part. Edgar Nailles and his amusingly named next-door neighbour Paul Hammer take turns as the focus of the first two parts of the book, Nailles' difficulties with his son's overwhelming depression and the events that led up to it, and Hammer's account of his own fug of cloudy depression and how it led him to Bullet Park. It's all very Americana mid-century stuff. And then, without getting into spoilers, at that 80 per cent or so mark, there's just a sudden sharp left-field yank that turns this both darkly bizarre and bizarrely dark, and this proceeds for what is ultimately a very short epilogue of sorts to the suburban soap opera that preceded it. It made me laugh out loud at the absurd turn it had taken, but to its credit made me reassess or rethink what had come before it - was this underlying darkness always there and I was too dense to detect it? Or, as I suspect, is the whole point that everything feels so safe, community-minded and harmless on the surface but the tidiness conceals the dark side of community living? It makes it a far more fascinating read than I was willing to give it credit for. I think if I’d had more time to reflect on this it probably would have actually been lower-ranked than it is now, but it ends with a bang so it’s left me a bit unsure about how to rank it.

21) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – Arundhati Roy

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This was obviously a hotly anticipated book, and therefore ripe for disappointment. Having adored, like so many others, The God of Small Things, a book I read quite early in my intellectual education and that has stuck with me very deeply, the fact is this book is not nearly as good. What's even more disappointing is that this very much feels like the book that a profoundly talented writer like Roy might write after hesitating, false starting, and finally succumbing to the pressure to write another novel after 20 years of hot anticipation. It's ambitious, fractured and feels very haphazard and gets going in blurts and backfires. This is not to say it's bad at all; her razor-sharp social commentary is well-honed here with a healthy dose of wit and humanity, and her prose is just as fluid and intriguing. But the imagery that was so impactful in TGoST here feels patchy and flimsy, and while the individual narratives are piecemeal quite compelling, it never really synthesises into a compelling whole. And again, it's an unfavourable comparison to her first book, but a big part of what made TGoST such an affecting book is the fact that the atrocities and inhumanity -which is a central part of this, too - are all seen through the eyes of children who transform the violence into a unique and beautifully idiosyncratic language. While much of the action here centres around two babies, they are plot points, rather than characters. All in all my main issue is the fact that there are too many characters and not a particularly coherent theme running through it. It's kind of a book about Kashmir, about unrequited love, about motherhood and female identity, but it's not enough about any of them. It's undeniable that Roy is a supremely talented writer, so I hope she doesn't wait so long before exercising this talent again. This feels like a very strong person flexing their unexercised, tired muscles after a protracted rest.