My dear readers, it feels like it’s been a while since we actually talked (I talked (wrote) to you) about reading. But I’ve been reading, and I’ll prove it:
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
In early June I was moving through The Death of the Heart at a reasonable, clip. Kathryn and I read this one together for our podcast (listen here or here), and she loved it! I liked it. Bowen spins up the story of one Portia Quayne, 16 years old and recently orphaned. She is the product of her father’s ill-advised extramarital affair—ill-advised not because it resulted in Portia, but because he could not have predicted that his rightful wife would shove him out the door into his mistresses arms upon learning about the begotten babe.
And so Portia’s childhood was spent traveling around the continent with her banished father and her mother, who was probably also banished by polite society but anyway would have had to follow him even if she weren’t. The reader is made to understand that it was an unusual upbringing, sometimes uncomfortable, and more unglamorous than it sounds, but overall quite happy. But then her father dies, and not many years after her mother, and on account of her father’s oddly prescient dying wish to his firstborn son, Portia is sent to stay—for at least a year—with her half brother, Thomas and his wife, Anna.
In their house where everything looks as it should, and Thomas squirrels away in his study like a man should, and Anna holds court in the drawing room like a woman should, and they seem to communicate without ever actually saying anything like a married couple should, Portia finds herself confused and lonely. Worse, when they do talk, and in particular when Anna’s friends come to visit and talk, it seems like they say a whole lot without actually meaning anything. They look at Portia like she’s a strange creature, and the feeling is mutual. Her only refuge is Matchett, the sometimes rough but at least legible housekeeper.
Then Portia falls in love with exactly the wrong kind of man for a sixteen year old to fall in love with, and it’s off to the races from there—her heart soars and sinks, her eyes close in satisfied slumber and are again forced open to peer out at the unrecognizable world. She begins to grow up. Bowen presents a novel that feels like a slow moving stage play to start, a comedy in the middle and a tragedy in the end. She is a psychological explorer, mostly through Portia’s eyes, only jumping occasionally to someone else’s perspective.
For me, it always felt a bit like I was missing something—not understanding the laws of the world Portia was living in. This was perhaps an intentional effect to mirror Portia’s own disorientation, but it left me feeling more on the outs than I prefer to be. Bowen’s greatest strength for me was actually her description of setting. Whether it’s the arrival of spring—“it is about five o’clock in an evening that the first hour of spring strikes—autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day”—or a coastal forrest, lush and perfect for a desperate kiss, or the unexpected refuge of a somewhat anonymous hotel, Bowen makes you feel that you’re there. She gets all that exactly right.
Gliff by Ali Smith
Next up was Gliff by Ali Smith, which I picked up at Three Lives on a total whim and started to read immediately. I read it in the course of 24 hours, give or take, starting in a canopied hotel room bed during nap time in Baltimore, then mostly in the lobby of the Marlton back in New York, and finally sitting at the bar at my favorite bar. Very unusual behavior for a very unusual book.
The blurb itself gave nothing away, promising only an uncertain near-future, two children and a horse. If designed to intrigue, it did its job. The story opens on two children, Bri and Rose. They are traveling with their mother’s boyfriend because their mother is covering for their aunt who works as a maid at a hotel but is sick. Their mother cannot leave the hotel and it’s clear—though not clear why—that they need to leave without her for a time. Someone is painting strange red lines around people’s houses, and this has happened to them.
Leif brings Bri and Rose to an empty safe house in another town, buys them enough canned food for one week to ten days depending on how much they eat, and tells them he will be back. He does not come back. As Bri and Rose try to survive on their own, it becomes clear that nefarious forces are at play. The government, in collaboration with corrupt and abusive corporations are punishing people for something. For knowing something they’re not supposed to know? For resisting control and classification?
They meet their horse—who Rose playfully names Gliff—and along with Gliff, the boy whose father owns the field he’s in. Disconcertingly, the boy, Colon—who Rose mercifully renames Collin—is the DDC/S. That’s the Designated Data Collector slash Strangers, and he has a list of questions for them, ranging from date of birth, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, to what they think the single most important issue facing us in this country today is, dogs or cats, whether they think that homegrown environmental protest terrorists should be exiled along with illegal immigrants, and whether they prefer to shop online or in person.
Smith tackles a laundry list of what I’ll call for convenience sake, modern troubles and troubling modern developments. There’s the commodification of everything, including the people, consumerism, corruption, pharmaceutical companies pedaling addiction, chemical companies telling customers that poisonous pesticides are safe, the contaminated food supply, mass extinction of the birds, propaganda, brainwashing, government surveillance, data privacy (or lack thereof), the gutting of education, the subordination of the pursuit of knowledge, banning and destruction of books, unpredictable weather, a class of people known as “unverifiables,” state-run “rehabilitation” programs for those unverifiables.
But tackle isn’t quite right. More like, Smith brushes up against all of these things. Flirts with them to varying degrees. And the real state of things—the power players in this nightmare world, the people they’re trying to exploit and the secret horrors they’re trying to hide, whoever they are—it’s all revealed so slowly and so incompletely. You too are in the dark, and you start to feel like you’re reading a poem not a novel. A very captivating and suspenseful poem...
&&& A Tease!
I was going to write about Northanger Abbey by my girl Jane, which I also read this month, but I ran out of time, and it’s the 4th of July so I’m not going to try to squeeze it in, so you’ll have to wait! My thoughts ~~forthcoming~~.
love you, bye!
I love your book reviews! I'll have to pick up the Ali Smith for myself. I am also considering a re-read of Northanger Abbey, It's going to the top of my TBR.