Scan barcode
A review by arirang
Flesh of the Peach by Helen McClory
3.0
And then after that. She would make sure her life would no longer be a sentence fragment or shackled to metaphors, but a steady drawing forward and one day back, back home.
Freight Books is a small UK independent publisher “With a focus on publishing high quality literary fiction … [with] a commitment to compelling narratives, scrupulous editing, high quality production and imaginative marketing, supported by a strong and identifiable brand”.
Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach is her debut novel, written before but published after she had made a name for herself in short stories and flash fiction.
Wonderfully, the book is dedicated “To all the unlikable women in fiction and outwith it.”
As she has explained elsewhere:
In the same interview, when asked to recommend a book, she references a more contemporary example of the unlikable woman character, Helen in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s [b:Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|31213490|Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|Patty Yumi Cottrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476987443s/31213490.jpg|51868021] (one of my books of 2017). And from my recent reading (and recent award shortlists) Eileen in Eileen, Neve in First Love and Mattie in History of Wolves are other obvious examples.
McClory’s Sarah (as an aside, named Astral is earlier versions of the story - see e.g. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tennessee-stop/, a name which has a rather different feel) is another in the same mould, but with some interesting differences.
Firstly McClory has chosen to use subjective third person rather than first person narration, which initially I found a little artificial, but on reflection actually works quite effectively as it allows some limited narrative distancing.
Secondly, and as more of a personal view, McClory to me made a brave decision to make Sarah unlikable – difficult to like - rather than dislikable – very possible to strongly dislike. Most of the other contemporary examples fall into the latter camp – the characters almost go out of their way to be unpleasant, there is plenty of black humour, and I at least couldn’t help but secretly like most of them, whereas Sarah is just unlikable.
Related to that, while Sarah has clearly had a very troubled relationship with her mother, she also comes from a life of relative privilege.
She had done so well in the local school.
She had hidden at the front of class.
She had been privileged to live in a mansion.
She contracted bronchitis every February.
She couldn’t speak because every word she spoke was privilege, she couldn’t stop herself speaking because she was lonely, hopeful. She was the daughter of a famous, popular artist. An unacknowledged daughter of a Japanese-American art lover
The novel opens with Sarah Browne (*), in her late twenties, British but living away from her family in New York (She had left that all long ago and was different now), and at the top of the Empire State Building. Her married lover “Kennedy” (that Sarah doesn’t actually know her first name is itself rather emblematic) has just abruptly ended their relationship after her husband found out about it (Sarah suspects at Kennedy’s volition) and almost at the same time, while working in a cafe, Sarah received a phone call telling her of the death, back in England, of her mother, Maud.
And that was how Sarah lost her job
And all she was was an émigré deadmother wifefucker in pieces, spines, vibrating at an awful screeching pitch
From there, to the Empire State building. From there, her pieces sent out to be hopeful and reformative – somewhere other.
There was no love lost between Sarah and her mother, and her death means Sarah, her only child, inherits the spacious family home, another family lodge in New Mexico, and the money from Maud’s recent resurgence in popularity as an artist. But it still leaves Sarah feeling grief and anger:
But how lucky she was, her mother had left all those millions to her. Just put it in a clean little envelope, Madam Barrister, thank you very much, like a neat towelette slipped alongside the balled-up pink knickers from last night.
She unwrapped another ginger. Sugar rush helped, fire helped. Working the wad against her back teeth, almost choking her. Two paths had emerged. One home across the pond, and another unseen in the American interior beckoning her. It was an easy choice, all considered.
She first undertakes a long road-trip from New York to the family lodge in New Mexico, now hers, first by Greyhound Bus then by hire-car (a car she seems to have no intention of returning):
Here we see the influence of McClory's short-story background as the story is told in brief vignettes - over 100 chapters in 200 pages - with leaps (albeit small) in the narrative, as well as flashbacks to her relationship with her mother.
The road-trip also allows McClory to showcase her descriptive prose and her admiration for the American countryside, if not necessarily for the culture (in Arthur Dent style, she is often in search of a decent cup of tea).
The day was long and hers alone. American lonesome. She stopped at turnoffs, at petrol stations, at viewpoints. She drank juice, she sang to the dashboard. The afternoon yawned and stretched. The landscape altered by degrees that seemed minuscule until they seemed radical.
In New Mexico she meets and forms an uneasy relationship with the similarly troubled Theo, son of the owner of the neighbouring property (largely home to a concealed cannabis farm).
At one point during a road-trip, they visit the Bandelier National Monument, and the remains of the hotel that was once, rather oddly, run inside the historic archaeological site Frijoles Canyon in the 1920s (https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/historyculture/mrs-frey.htm). What a charmingly insouciant and invasive thing to do thinks Sarah and imagines herself as running the hotel and its surrounding fruit farm, the first (I think) of a recurring image of the flesh of a peach that gives the novel its title:
The weight of a home grown peach in a calloused hand. No one else, nothing but that specific, gentle kind of contact, that imagined, tender flesh.
Road-trips aside, Sarah also spends a lot of time alone, thinking:
I was busy masturbating and panicking, she thought. Forward momentum really wasn't my concern.
In particular, there are many flashbacks to her troubled relationship with her mother (rather less to the aftermath of her affair with Kennedy, which seems more implicit). Her mother and her aunt, who lived with them, both drank extensively and while Sarah was used as a model in her mother's painting, her mixed-race origins and black hair were turned into the features of an English rose:
It wasn't really you that Mum immortalised in paint. It was that blonde girl, ethereal, fully white-English. Later Maud would label her 'Little Belle' because it was a name that would work in most markets. You were never more than a prop, a point of reference for Mum's imaginary Little Belle ... once, you scratched off a little of her, just the hair by her face, with your fingernail. Under that top flake of yellow, black hair. Yours.
The narrative is also broken up by interludes of "What She Would Spend Her Money On" often somewhat surreal and troubled:
She would get huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle. Smooth marbled flesh. She would hang these in a specially prepared cellar and frighten herself with their bodies and pungency in the dark. She would buy up old china tea sets, the kind so thin they seem unwell and you fear to hold them. She would never have anything but fires on and drink beef broth to stave all fevers. She would keep a collection of artisan knives and cut the meat for hanging on an antique clockwork roaster that would dangle the carcass part over the fire. She would watch the carcass become meat as it cooked in the huge yellow tiled kitchen. She would eat handfuls of the meat, cooled, bloody, in the salon, all alone, with the window letting in humid air off The Channel. Plush in a chair, chewing. Vases of lilies on coffee tables too high to see if she had guests.
And at the novel's end, she has a rather odd sojourn in Paris, in plot terms to give her practice at being rich as she shops on the Champs Elysee, but gives the author the chance to plug what, to be fair, is the best bookshop I've ever visited, Shakespeare and company.
And underlying the whole novel and Helen's character is a strong air of barely repressed violence - she confesses to an incident with her mother and one senses her relationship with Theo may end similarly.
Overall - 3.5 stars. As mentioned I Helen successfully and bravely (in authorial terms) unlikable but I suspect I won't remember her in time as well as some of the other examples I have mentioned. And while the prose is excellent, the American road-trip parts of the novel felt, at times they belonged in another book.
Rounded up to 4 for now.
Authors website:
https://schietree.wordpress.com/fiction/
Freight Books is a small UK independent publisher “With a focus on publishing high quality literary fiction … [with] a commitment to compelling narratives, scrupulous editing, high quality production and imaginative marketing, supported by a strong and identifiable brand”.
Helen McClory’s Flesh of the Peach is her debut novel, written before but published after she had made a name for herself in short stories and flash fiction.
Wonderfully, the book is dedicated “To all the unlikable women in fiction and outwith it.”
As she has explained elsewhere:
There are loads of real women who get slapped with the label ‘unlikeable’ (the violence of the metaphor is apt, I think). Take your pick – as soon as I write this, another one will be being vilified in the public eye. Sometimes for some actual sin, sometimes for having an awkward personality or a mental illness or the temerity to have a body and some opinions, occasionally clumsily expressed. We can’t escape judgements and judging – the internet is a 24-hour courtroom. For fictional women, I think of Good Morning Midnight’s Sasha Jensen. Miss Jean Brodie. Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. I think of women written by male authors who get a bit more of a pass – Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp. I think of films packed with scheming dames and femmes fatales and bunny boilers. I think of the way we see women as villains when they are oversized, full of feelings that unsettle, when queer, trans, deformed, not one of ‘us’, old. My book is for all these women and the space they make (and necessarily complicate) for the rest of us.http://thecaledonianovelaward.com/outandabout/
In the same interview, when asked to recommend a book, she references a more contemporary example of the unlikable woman character, Helen in Patty Yumi Cottrell’s [b:Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|31213490|Sorry to Disrupt the Peace|Patty Yumi Cottrell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1476987443s/31213490.jpg|51868021] (one of my books of 2017). And from my recent reading (and recent award shortlists) Eileen in Eileen, Neve in First Love and Mattie in History of Wolves are other obvious examples.
McClory’s Sarah (as an aside, named Astral is earlier versions of the story - see e.g. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tennessee-stop/, a name which has a rather different feel) is another in the same mould, but with some interesting differences.
Firstly McClory has chosen to use subjective third person rather than first person narration, which initially I found a little artificial, but on reflection actually works quite effectively as it allows some limited narrative distancing.
Secondly, and as more of a personal view, McClory to me made a brave decision to make Sarah unlikable – difficult to like - rather than dislikable – very possible to strongly dislike. Most of the other contemporary examples fall into the latter camp – the characters almost go out of their way to be unpleasant, there is plenty of black humour, and I at least couldn’t help but secretly like most of them, whereas Sarah is just unlikable.
Related to that, while Sarah has clearly had a very troubled relationship with her mother, she also comes from a life of relative privilege.
She had done so well in the local school.
She had hidden at the front of class.
She had been privileged to live in a mansion.
She contracted bronchitis every February.
She couldn’t speak because every word she spoke was privilege, she couldn’t stop herself speaking because she was lonely, hopeful. She was the daughter of a famous, popular artist. An unacknowledged daughter of a Japanese-American art lover
The novel opens with Sarah Browne (*), in her late twenties, British but living away from her family in New York (She had left that all long ago and was different now), and at the top of the Empire State Building. Her married lover “Kennedy” (that Sarah doesn’t actually know her first name is itself rather emblematic) has just abruptly ended their relationship after her husband found out about it (Sarah suspects at Kennedy’s volition) and almost at the same time, while working in a cafe, Sarah received a phone call telling her of the death, back in England, of her mother, Maud.
And that was how Sarah lost her job
And all she was was an émigré deadmother wifefucker in pieces, spines, vibrating at an awful screeching pitch
From there, to the Empire State building. From there, her pieces sent out to be hopeful and reformative – somewhere other.
There was no love lost between Sarah and her mother, and her death means Sarah, her only child, inherits the spacious family home, another family lodge in New Mexico, and the money from Maud’s recent resurgence in popularity as an artist. But it still leaves Sarah feeling grief and anger:
But how lucky she was, her mother had left all those millions to her. Just put it in a clean little envelope, Madam Barrister, thank you very much, like a neat towelette slipped alongside the balled-up pink knickers from last night.
She unwrapped another ginger. Sugar rush helped, fire helped. Working the wad against her back teeth, almost choking her. Two paths had emerged. One home across the pond, and another unseen in the American interior beckoning her. It was an easy choice, all considered.
She first undertakes a long road-trip from New York to the family lodge in New Mexico, now hers, first by Greyhound Bus then by hire-car (a car she seems to have no intention of returning):
Here we see the influence of McClory's short-story background as the story is told in brief vignettes - over 100 chapters in 200 pages - with leaps (albeit small) in the narrative, as well as flashbacks to her relationship with her mother.
The road-trip also allows McClory to showcase her descriptive prose and her admiration for the American countryside, if not necessarily for the culture (in Arthur Dent style, she is often in search of a decent cup of tea).
The day was long and hers alone. American lonesome. She stopped at turnoffs, at petrol stations, at viewpoints. She drank juice, she sang to the dashboard. The afternoon yawned and stretched. The landscape altered by degrees that seemed minuscule until they seemed radical.
In New Mexico she meets and forms an uneasy relationship with the similarly troubled Theo, son of the owner of the neighbouring property (largely home to a concealed cannabis farm).
At one point during a road-trip, they visit the Bandelier National Monument, and the remains of the hotel that was once, rather oddly, run inside the historic archaeological site Frijoles Canyon in the 1920s (https://www.nps.gov/band/learn/historyculture/mrs-frey.htm). What a charmingly insouciant and invasive thing to do thinks Sarah and imagines herself as running the hotel and its surrounding fruit farm, the first (I think) of a recurring image of the flesh of a peach that gives the novel its title:
The weight of a home grown peach in a calloused hand. No one else, nothing but that specific, gentle kind of contact, that imagined, tender flesh.
Road-trips aside, Sarah also spends a lot of time alone, thinking:
I was busy masturbating and panicking, she thought. Forward momentum really wasn't my concern.
In particular, there are many flashbacks to her troubled relationship with her mother (rather less to the aftermath of her affair with Kennedy, which seems more implicit). Her mother and her aunt, who lived with them, both drank extensively and while Sarah was used as a model in her mother's painting, her mixed-race origins and black hair were turned into the features of an English rose:
It wasn't really you that Mum immortalised in paint. It was that blonde girl, ethereal, fully white-English. Later Maud would label her 'Little Belle' because it was a name that would work in most markets. You were never more than a prop, a point of reference for Mum's imaginary Little Belle ... once, you scratched off a little of her, just the hair by her face, with your fingernail. Under that top flake of yellow, black hair. Yours.
The narrative is also broken up by interludes of "What She Would Spend Her Money On" often somewhat surreal and troubled:
She would get huge slabs of carcass from best-beloved cattle. Smooth marbled flesh. She would hang these in a specially prepared cellar and frighten herself with their bodies and pungency in the dark. She would buy up old china tea sets, the kind so thin they seem unwell and you fear to hold them. She would never have anything but fires on and drink beef broth to stave all fevers. She would keep a collection of artisan knives and cut the meat for hanging on an antique clockwork roaster that would dangle the carcass part over the fire. She would watch the carcass become meat as it cooked in the huge yellow tiled kitchen. She would eat handfuls of the meat, cooled, bloody, in the salon, all alone, with the window letting in humid air off The Channel. Plush in a chair, chewing. Vases of lilies on coffee tables too high to see if she had guests.
And at the novel's end, she has a rather odd sojourn in Paris, in plot terms to give her practice at being rich as she shops on the Champs Elysee, but gives the author the chance to plug what, to be fair, is the best bookshop I've ever visited, Shakespeare and company.
And underlying the whole novel and Helen's character is a strong air of barely repressed violence - she confesses to an incident with her mother and one senses her relationship with Theo may end similarly.
Overall - 3.5 stars. As mentioned I Helen successfully and bravely (in authorial terms) unlikable but I suspect I won't remember her in time as well as some of the other examples I have mentioned. And while the prose is excellent, the American road-trip parts of the novel felt, at times they belonged in another book.
Rounded up to 4 for now.
Authors website:
https://schietree.wordpress.com/fiction/