nohoperadio's reviews
262 reviews

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

3.25

All characters are stock, everything that happens is implausible, the prose is artless in all senses, I was charmed anyhow. I’m not sure any author has ever loved her protagonist as much as Winifred Watson loves Miss Pettigrew–she so palpably wants her creation to escape the dreariness imposed by her poverty, conservative upbringing and low self-esteem that the story is just shameless wish-fulfillment. But it’s such earnest wish-fulfillment (and, crucially, with a sense of fun and awareness of how silly it is) that the effect is touching.

This is the beatific voice of the drunk girl who has noticed you’re not enjoying the party and for five minutes makes it her divinely appointed calling to show you that the world is your friend. Let us never close our hearts to this voice.

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

3.5

This book, whose significant plot points mostly consist of unspeakable pointless cruelties inflicted on vulnerable children, is very interested in fucking you up. The book is frighteningly intent on this goal and very good at it. There are several scenes in here where the horror was, for me, a full-body experience, and at least once I thought I was in danger of being physically sick. If you read this, there’s going to be  a few moments where you think you’re seeing the worst of what I’m talking about, and you’ll be wrong.

So it might sound a little disingenuous when I say that my main complaint about this book is that it’s not brutal enough. The problem is our narrator, Betty, who is nominally a small child for most of the events of the book, but whose understanding of the traumatic situations she and her family are facing is so free of childlike confusion and helplessness that the effect is to trivialize them. I’ll give one unextreme but unusually clear example, this comes shortly after a scene in which Betty is in a body-image-related depression after facing racist bullying based on her visibly Cherokee ancestry:

But as I stared longer at my reflection, I asked myself what was so terribly wrong with the way I looked. After all, my ancestors had bundled magic on a thousand walks through Christ and millennias, denying the faintest suggestion that they were not beautiful enough. The black of my hair had been part of ancient ceremonies. My eyes were steeped in tradition, buoyed by the divinity of nature. Dad always said we came from great warriors. Did I not have this greatness in me? The power of a woman so ancient, but still young in her time. I imagined her as she was then. Her spirit fierce. Her bravery undeniable. How could I not be as powerful? Why could I not consider myself beautiful when I thought of her as the most beautiful one of all?

We all wish we lived in a world where nine-year-olds could therapy-talk themselves this effectively, but we all know we don’t. A big part of why we think of child abuse specifically as being so uniquely horrible is that we know children cannot do this, this wise philosophical distance that most of us struggle to achieve even as adults. However much pain she goes through, and there’s a lot, she’s never convincingly confused. This is not true of her mother and two sisters, who display all the moral and psychological disorientation you’d expect from the brutalities they suffer and feel like real people as a result. The story as narrated from their perspective would have been (both emotionally and technically) more difficult, but that’s the story this story made me want. 

Falconer by John Cheever

3.5

On a page-by-page basis there’s a lot of beauty and intelligence in this short novel, and I’m not totally sure why the whole didn’t leave a stronger impression on me than it did. Let’s have some of that beauty first:

The light in the prison, that late in the day, reminded Farragut of some forest he had skied through on a winter afternoon. The perfect diagonal of the light was cut by bars as trees would cut the light in some wood, and the largeness and mysteriousness of the place was like the largeness of some forest–some tapestry of knights and unicorns–where a succinct message was promised but where nothing was spoken but the vastness.

I won’t say this is representative, because as well as lyricism like this there’s also a lot of bodily fluids in this book (I think all of them?). Our hero, who has had a luckier life than many of his fellow prisoners, has nonetheless been fucked up by: drugs, war, marriage, his parents, and of course What He Did, all of which his new life affords him plenty of time to think around-not-about. All this comes through in vignettey little flashbacks that somehow didn’t add up to much for me even when they were individually moving. Does this mean I should read his short stories, which apparently is mostly what he wrote?

Worth noting: the prison gayness here is more wholehearted than I expected, enough to send me on a not-unrewarded trip to the Personal Life section of Cheever’s Wikipedia page. 

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

4.0

Two to three times per year I’ll try something published in the past decade, and this usually just results in renewed bafflement as to how anyone survives reading mostly new books without going crazy. Let time do a little sifting guys! The new books are just going to get old tomorrow anyway! But then that Claire-Louise Bennett book I picked up fresh eight years ago did change my life, so you know.

I did enjoy this one however. It’s true that “weirdly intense, partly one-sided, semi-gay teenage friendship that tries and fails to exclude the outside world entirely” is a particular emotional weak

point of mine, but this is a good and original version of that thing. Two young French girls who can only process their intimate feelings for each other by playing wacky pranks on people decide that their next wacky prank will be to write and publish a book of short stories about dead children, which leads to instant critical acclaim and one of the girls being sent abroad to an English finishing school; this greatly complicates the nature of their pranking and therefore the nature of their love, they’re forced to get more creative on both planes of being with mixed results, the whole thing ends in quiet anticlimax, which is to say it ends brutally. Yes, I did enjoy this one. 

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

2.5

Interestingly I didn’t like this very much, though I suspect that with time, as the memory of the actual experience of reading it erodes down into a rough idea of the book’s general concept, I’ll mistakenly start to think I liked it more than I in fact did.

I remember The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as a short story’s worth of material worked into a novella by presenting the same few scenes over again at different angles, to brilliant aesthetic effect. This feels like a short story’s worth of material worked into a novella by adding a bunch of inessential tedious stuff. I liked the main character when she was introduced in the first pages, she’s basically a huge offputting freak who gets her characterization largely via how other people respond to her, but then she spends most of the book in a foreign country where she has a good enough excuse to be an outsider that it isn’t as entertaining anymore.

Muriel Spark has built up enough good will by writing Jean Brodie that I’m not giving up on her yet. And I do think even this could be a great story without having to change much other than throwing out most of it. 

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

4.5

Having just gone on about how he has his one thing he always does, I come to his one book that’s nothing like that. Reading an Ishiguro set in a Tolkeinesque medieval Britain where dragons are real is actually less jarring than reading an Ishiguro written in the third person. But I actually really liked seeing his perennial obsessions come out so differently from usual. The fog that’s causing mass selective amnesia is a way to explore the old misremembering-as-self-definiton thing without having to be so clever about it, which is not in fact unwelcome. The ending has more genuine emotional weight than any I’ve read except the two big ones.

I wish he’d continued exploring how to do less-Ishiguro-shaped Ishiguro after this, but on the evidence of Klara and the Sun I guess that’s not the plan. 

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

3.75

Kazuo Ishiguro very much has his thing, his very specific thing he always does, which is: first-person narrators who seem to be very candid about telling you their life story at first but then we start noticing little tensions in the narrative and it gradually becomes clear there’s something huge they’re failing to acknowledge perhaps even to themselves because the huge thing directly contradicts the version of themselves they’re trying to create in the telling of the story.

It’s a fun thing! He’s good at it. But the question with each book is always, to what extent does this stuff feel like it emerges organically from the nature of the story being told vs feeling gimmicky, like something being imposed on a story that doesn’t suit it because Ishiguro wants to show off his clever unreliable narrating skills. In his two great novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, there’s no question at all: both books are, to me, absolute miracles, perfect stories that needed exactly Ishiguro’s skillset to do them justice. Everything else, so far, I’ve been less convinced even though I usually enjoy the ride anyway.

I enjoyed this ride and I wasn’t convinced. I loved the narrative voice, the characters are bigger personalities on the whole than in the first two Ishiguro books, the plot goes to some wild places; but our hero’s particular brand of insanity, and less forgivably, the ways everyone else reacts to it (or doesn’t), are perfectly and implausibly calibrated to keep the plot on its rails. It’s jarring in a way that might even be exciting if the author hadn’t elsewhere shown us how good this kind of thing can be when done right. But I’m afraid he has! 

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

4.0

The little seaside village which, unless I’m forgetting something, the narration doesn’t leave for a single page, makes for a very claustrophobic setting. Most of the cast (which is quite large and with screentime so equitably allocated that no character or group can really be called “main”, as seems to be Taylor’s way) live half in the shadow of hypothetical versions of themselves that live not here. Which is not to say they have particular dreams or even fantasies for the most part.

This collection of sad funny lives add up to a bit of a jumble, they don’t suddenly cohere into semi-resolution at the climax like in The Soul of Kindness, which feels intentional but is still less satisfying. 

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

4.75

My first Wodehouse, and I don’t think I’ve ever had less of a gap between expectations and reality; it turns out PG Wodehouse is the one famous author where the popular received-wisdom nutshell version of him is exactly what he is. And it’s very much my kind of thing and it’s close to perfectly executed. It turns out he has just under 100 books of fiction. Assuming the quality is as consistent as I’ve heard, I have a feeling I’m going to waste an awful lot of my life on this man’s silly little stories. 

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

2.75

Apparently Philip Larkin, that great master of finding unexpected beauty in the banal, was a big fan of this book.