The Corrections

I was disappointed by The Corrections.  It’s taken me absolutely ages to write this blog, just because I have so little passion for the book.  I think it is, mostly, another case of sky high expectations that couldn’t realistically be met.  Jonathan Franzen’s book is the story of a family; elderly couple Alfred and Enid and their three adult children and Enid’s desire for “one last Christmas” before Alfred is lost entirely to his Parkinson’s.  While I was hoping for some feeling of connection with the family dynamic I didn’t feel it.  Everyone in the book is kind of terrible.

Part of my issue is that it’s a very long book, around 600 or so pages, that starts off with a hell of a long visit to middle child Chip.  Chip is a wanker.  He’s a misogynist.  An ex-collage professor who, even years later and after losing his job for it, still thinks he was the victim after an affair with a student.  He spends much of his time in the early stages of the book being bitter and writing a screenplay about how evil women are.  I do not like Chip.  I think he put me the whole book.  After so many pages with him, I was unwilling to give any time to the people who raised him.  They did a shit job.  He’s an awful person.  His brother and sister aren’t much better, but I have sympathy for them at least.  Eldest son Gary is suffering from depression and so he gets a lot of leeway, their sister Denise is just chronically unable to get her shit together.  She ruins any job that she has by sleeping with pretty much anyone.

I expected something from the book that it never delivered upon.  My family has been through the ordeal of having a member have an incurable and degenerative disease, granted it was Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s, but I still expected some level of familiarity or connection.  That just wasn’t there.  The family dynamic is such an odd one, and it crops up both between the Lambert kids and Alfred and Enid as well as between Gary and his wife and kids.  My problem with it is that rather than interacting with each other, they just try and impose their will upon each other.  Sometimes it’s like they have no connection to one another.  Or emotional maturity.  No-one has any emotional maturity and I think a book essentially about Parkinson’s calls for a dose of it. 

I’m sure there are some parts of the book that I did enjoy.  It certainly picked up after Chip was in it less.  And Denise’s parts were actually pretty entertaining.  But the overwhelming feeling that I am left with is disappointment.  And after leaving it some time, a good couple of weeks, it’s the feeling that I’m left with.  There are no parts of the book that stand out as excellent and I wanted there to be.  I always want there to be when I read a book on The List.  This isn’t like Intimacy.  I can why people could love this book, but I don’t.  I think maybe if I’d been in a different frame of mind when reading it I’d have loved it and would be singing its praises right now; or even if Franzen had started the whole thing by introducing us to Denise rather than Chip the chauvinist.

I’m now reading Momento Mori by Muriel Spark.  

Intimacy

I so enjoyed TheBuddha of Suburbia that I was super looking forward to reading more of Hanif Kureishi’s work, even more so when I found out that he also wrote My Beautiful Laundrette.  My Beautiful Laundrette is a wonderful film.  I can’t recommend it enough; if you haven’t already seen it, go and watch it now.  Even if mid-1980s mixed-race gay relationships aren’t your thing, it’s worth a watch for Daniel Day-Lewis’s hair alone.  Anyway, back to the point: I had high expectations for Intimacy.  It doesn’t really disappoint, but after such a long run of great books, it seems a little mediocre. 

The plot is simply the thoughts of a man, Jay, on the night before he leaves partner Susan and their two children.  Jay’s kind of a jerk.  After refusing to marry Susan he repeatedly proposes to his much younger mistress.  I’m not a big believer in marriage, but even I can see that this is a pretty shitty move on Jay’s part.  Everything plot-wise is revealed in flashbacks, so we get a sense of the relationship falling apart while we already know that, ultimately, Jay has no real interest in saving it.  I spent a lot of this book feeling bad for Susan.  She could do better.  It’s not by any means a bad book- no I didn’t like the main character and the ending- to spoiler it- is completely unbelievable.  His oft proposed to ex-mistress is waiting with open arms once Jay leaves his family.  It doesn’t seem likely and he’s not likeable enough that the unlikely can be overlooked.

I do like the narrative structure of the book.  It’s incredibly difficult to make 150-odd pages of essential plotlessness interesting, but Kureishi nails it.  The fact that you know the relationship is doomed from the start gives the whole thing this wickedly bittersweet air.  It does, however, make the book very difficult to write about.  Most things that aren’t Jay leaving Susan feel like subplot- his happily married friends and his miserably divorced ones.  The tone of Intimacy is much more grown up than The Buddha of Suburbia, I remember comparing that book to Adrian Mole at the time.  The adult tone isn’t too surprising, given that Kureishi is writing about adults this time, and cynical ones at that.  The book is a short one, and in all reality not much happens.  This does not make for edge of the seat blogging.

I found, generally, this to be an easy book to read quickly but I’m really struggling to write about it in much depth.  As I said, compared to the stuff I’ve been reading recently, it’s fairly mediocre and I’m not really sure why it’s on the list.  It’s a book that’s hard to see as an enduring classic or anybody’s favourite.  Maybe it comes down to lack of experience in the world.  I’ve never had a family to abandon and I don’t really care much for kids- especially Jay’s fictional and nameless ones, so some of the emotional punch of the family’s inevitable upheaval is lost on me.  In the end I’m just left with the feeling that Susan is better off without Jay and I really don’t think that’s what Kureishi was going for.

My next book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

Chocky

So it’s blog time again and once more I have a book to rave about.  I’ve missed this.  It feels like it’s been an age since I’ve had a run of books that I really enjoyed and now I’m in one again and hope it lasts.  It never lasts.  I’ve been sporadically on about how much I love John Wyndham all year and I can’t believe I never tried his stuff before now.  I know we’re only half way through, but he’s shaping up to be my personal discovery of 2015.  Suffice to say, like The Midwich Cuckoos and Day of the Triffids before it, Chocky is just excellent.

It tells the story of David Gore, distant father to his two children: ten year-old Polly and her adopted older brother Matthew.  To be fair, he’s kind of a shit father to Polly.  He’s never really that interested in what she has to say- usually it’s nonsense about Twinklehooves the pony, main character in her favourite book series (as an aside, these are a pretty hilarious parody of kids’ books and include stories of Twinklehooves joining the circus and ballet).  Anyway, Matthew hears voices; or more specifically a voice, in his head and so is the more attention worthy child.  As the book goes on David and his wife Mary become more convinced that Chocky is more than just an imaginary friend, especially once they discover that she has the ability to control Matthew’s body.  As benevolent as these possessions are Chocky is an unknown and so Mary fears her to the point where it becomes clear that Chocky has to go.

There’s a hell of a lot to like in this book.  The more I read of Wyndham, the more I think that he was just decades ahead of his time.  Chunks of Chocky centre around the fact that Earth is pretty backward scientifically speaking and that we will, eventually need a new source of power.  This is a book written in 1968 implying that solar power is primitive.  I didn’t even know the technology for solar power existed in 1968. 

There’s also some marvellous gender politics at play.  Chocky, not being human, finds the delineation between male and female ridiculous.  While her confidant Matthew is find with this, she is only into using a gendered pronoun because no-one else can get their head around the idea.  You can see why she picked him.  Where this does however fall apart is the characterisation of Mary Gore.  Sometimes, it’s hard to see why David married her- she is the main negative influence in the book and David has a tendency to come across as scornful of her concerns for her child.  He doesn’t respect her worries.  He lies to her and makes Matthew complicit in his lies.

This is more cerebral sci-fi than Wyndham’s other books that I’ve been going on about this year.  Rather than concerning events that effect entire towns or countries, it’s the story of one family and their ability (or lack therefore of) to cope with extraordinary circumstances.  The actual science-y bit is theoretical in the extreme and not all that important to the plot.  In the end, it’s the family dynamic and the relationship between Chocky and Matthew that decides the story’s outcome far more than any science deus ex machina.

My next read is Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy.  

The Nose

I’m a little bit worried that my blog post about The Nose will end up being longer than the story itself.  So, brevity being the sole of wit; I will attempt to curb the outward flourishes and keep this short.  I think I’m failing already.

Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist little tale is the story of a man, Major Kovalyov, who one day wakes up without his nose.  Meanwhile, said nose turns up in a bread roll at his neighbour’s house and subsequently arses around town pretending to be a gentleman.  Our hero is, naturally, desperate to be reunited with his olfactory organ- it’s simply not the done thing to be seen without one’s nose.  But he receives no help.  Apparently, you can’t advertise for a missing nose in the Russian press.  It’s no more ridiculous than Vladimir Putin’s ice hockey skills, but only one of those stories will fly.  Clearly there are some differences in the press between now and the 1830s.

It’s a nice short story- quick and fairly easy to read.  I think I’m showing my ignorance of literature in general when all I can think to compare it to is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.  It has the same matter of factness as the whole, “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin,” thing.  In fact, I’m pretty sure the version I read used the words “giant insect” or something of a similar ilk as opposed to “monstrous vermin,” so it was even more deadpan.  Thus the issue of translation rears its ugly head again.  But I’m getting off track…

I’ve never been too confident about what the kind of absurdism in The Nose and The Metamorphosis is sending up.  I’m sure it’s very obvious if you’re more up on mid-19^th Century Russian culture than I am, but to me it’s far less clear cut than something like The Trial.  It’s an enjoyable read nonetheless. 

Part of me does feel, though, that this story has been somewhat ruined by Harry Potter.  It’s so difficult to imagine without a nose without being at least slightly influenced by Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemorty face.  It makes it very difficult to take Gogol’s absurdist story seriously.  It probably needs to be taken seriously.  No doubt it’s really a critique of some atrocity committed in pre-Revolutionary Russia; wizardly connotations are almost certainly inappropriate.

So there you have it.  Gogol’s The Nose is a good’un. To be honest, even if it were awful, it only takes about 20 minutes to read.  So why not read it?

I’m now back to reading John Wyndham.  This time it’s Chocky.