"A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman"

The English writer Margaret Drabble is best known for her many novels written over a long career, several of which I have read and enjoyed. She is also a biographer of writers and a scholar of English literature. She has written far less short fiction, but readers are fortunate that the short stories she has written have been collected in a new book, “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Most of Drabble’s fiction, long and short, focuses on women characters, usually professional women in England. The stories are feminist in a non-explicit, non-didactic, moderate, English way. In this collection, most of the main characters are working through some issue or conflict, often related to being a woman in today’s world, and trying to understand their own feelings about the issue at hand. For example: How does it feel when your verbally cruel husband dies, and is it OK that your main feeling is relief and freedom? How does it feel when you think you might be dying, and you are so afraid for your young children to experience their mother’s death and absence? How does it feel to be so in love with a house and a way of life that you don’t care which man you have to marry to get it? How does it feel to allow your imagination to get too involved in the affairs of a man you met briefly on a train, and what does it mean that you allowed this to happen? How does it feel to be involved in a long term affair but know that you will never be able to be together more than the occasional meeting or brief vacation? How does it feel to break someone’s heart without even realizing you are doing it? The reader cannot help getting involved in these situations and dilemmas. And, as it perhaps goes without saying for a writer of Drabble’s stature, the writing is quietly assured and quite beautiful. I have the feeling that Drabble isn’t as well known in the U.S. as she should be; readers who have not read her work, please consider doing so; this collection of stories would be a good place to start.

"Family Dancing"

I recently read and posted (6/8/11 and 6/12/11) on two of David Leavitt’s novels; my comments were lukewarm. I have now (belatedly!) read his collection of short stories, “Family Dancing” (Knopf, 1984), perhaps his most well-known book, and now I “get” why his work has been praised by both critics and the reading public. His stories, as the title indicates, are all about families, and the many ways their members are entangled, are happy, are miserable, misunderstand each other, and drive each other crazy, yet provide a glue and a center for its members, drawing them back to each other again and again. There are certain common themes throughout many of the stories: divorce, cancer, mental illness, the connections of siblings, the gay brother, and the family home or summer cottage that keeps its hold on family members long after the children have dispersed to their adult lives. These stories are very readable and compelling.

"The Summer Without Men"

“The Summer Without Men” (Picador, 2011), by Siri Hustvedt, is a strange little novel. The narrator, Mia, a poet, has just been left by her longtime husband, Boris, and has had a sort of nervous breakdown. During the course of this novel, she spends the summer near her mother, and gradually recovers an interest in life, as she connects with her mother and her friends, a group of young girls whom she teaches poetry, and her neighbor Lola and her family. Mia is an extremely well-read person, and writes of philosophy, medicine, and more. She is interested in figuring out the differences between women and men, and what makes relationships and marriages work or not work. There are a number of intriguing events and scenes, as well as some bravura speeches about life and literature, in this quirky but compelling novel, a novel that appears to follow its own rules, and is ultimately both thought-provoking and satisfying.

Memorable Journeys in Novels

Another "memorables" list: Memorable Journeys in Novels

-Jane Eyre’s days wandering on the moors in “Jane Eyre” (Bronte)
-Leopold Bloom making his way around Dublin in “Ulysses” (Joyce)
-Clarissa Dalloway walking around London in “Mrs. Dalloway” (Woolf)
-Marlow’s journey down the Congo River in “Heart of Darkness” (Conrad)
-the Joads’ journey from Oklahoma to California in “The Grapes of Wrath” (Steinbeck)
-Sal Paradiso's and Dean Moriarty’s travels through America in “On the Road” (Kerouac)
-Jasmine’s journey from India to and within the United States in “Jasmine” (Mukherjee)
-Sister Mary Joseph Praise's and Dr. Thomas Stone’s voyage across the ocean from India to Africa in “Cutting for Stone” (Verghese)

"The Lemon Table"

I am apparently on a bit of a Julian Barnes kick (see my posts of 5/21/11 and 5/26/11). I have now just finished another of his short story collections, “The Lemon Table” (Knopf, 2004), and am becoming more and more of a fan of Barnes. This collection is lovely but sad. It focuses on age and mortality; in the last story, we are told that in China the lemon represents death. The stories are not so much “about” aging and death as about how we humans think about those topics, and deal with their inevitability in our lives. The stories take place in a wide variety of times and places, and the characters are varied as well. These stories keep the reader’s attention, and there are a few surprises. One of my favorites is “The Fruit Cage,” about a long marriage seen through the son’s eyes; this story reminds us that no one, not even family members, really knows the true nature of any given marriage. One of the saddest stories is “Appetite,” in which a wife reads recipes from favorite cookbooks to her much-loved husband who is disappearing into his dementia; only the recipes still give him pleasure, but sometimes -- unpredictably -- at the cost of hurting his wife’s feelings with his harsh remarks. In another poignant story, “The Story of Mats Israelson,” missed messages and lost opportunities keep a pair of would-be lovers apart for perhaps 30 years. Each of these eleven stories is beautifully crafted; each character is both unique and somehow universal; the writing is evocative and beautiful.

Reading Performance Programs

As I have noted before, reading material is everywhere, not just in books and magazines. I have written, for example, about conference programs and, just yesterday, about greeting cards. Going to a wonderful, exciting performance of the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival -- yet another reason I love living in the Bay Area -- the other day made me think about programs at concerts, plays, and other performances. Such programs have a utilitarian value, obviously, in providing information about performances, performers, order of performances, and so on. Beyond that, they often give informative notes and context. Some also have ads. Some are large and fancy; some are small and simple. Some are colorful; some are black and white. Some are booklets; some are one piece of paper folded in half. Some cover just the day’s performance; some serve for a whole series of performances. I liked the program for the Ethnic Dance Festival because it was colorful and gave substantial information about each of the eight dance groups performing that day, as well as about all the other dance groups performing throughout the festival. My one quibble was that the background to the print was mostly dark colors, making it harder to read the print. But the information and the splendid photographs of performers made up for it. It would be a great souvenir for those who save programs; I personally stopped doing so some years ago, for reasons of space, and of knowing that it was highly unlikely that I would go back and look through them. But I do appreciate a program that combines clearly presented information with a bit of flair. By the way, my favorite dance performance that day was one combining South Indian dance and Japanese taiko drumming and dancing. Wow!

Choosing, Writing, and Reading Greeting Cards

A non-book kind of reading is reading greeting cards. Stationery stores, drugstores, supermarkets have aisles full of cards for all occasions: birthdays, engagements, weddings, anniversaries, get well, sympathy, new babies, graduations, retirements, and more. Then there are all the holidays: Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. And there are some strange “special days” obviously concocted by, or at least encouraged by, the card companies themselves: Secretaries’ Day (now Administrative Assistants’ Day), for example. Then there are subcategories in the card sections of stores: humorous, spiritual, inspirational, budget, etc. Despite the reams of cards available for sale, I often find it hard to find the right one for a specific person on a specific occasion. Many cards are too sentimental, too sugary, too trite, too awkwardly “funny,” too stiff and formal, too sexist, or too vulgar. I try to find cards with simple greetings: “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Holidays,” “Congratulations on your Graduation,” “With my Deep Sympathy.” If I can’t find the right card, I often use blank cards and simply write my own messages. Despite these negative remarks, I do like the idea of greeting cards, and enjoy sending and receiving them. For one thing, they are one of the last remnants of personal mail that arrives in one’s actual physical mailbox rather than email mailbox (although there are email greeting cards as well, and those are fine too).