"They Were Sisters," by Dorothy Whipple

I seem to be on a bit of a Dorothy Whipple binge. Sometimes when I discover a new (to me) writer whose work I really like, I find and read more and more of that author’s work. I imagine some of you do the same. I recently (on 1/24/12 and 1/30/12) wrote about two of Whipple’s books, and now I have read a third: “They Were Sisters” (Persephone, 2005; originally published by John Murray, 1943). I think I like this novel best of the Whipple books I have read so far. It describes the interlocking lives of three sisters who have taken different paths and married very different men. Lucy is the oldest sister, the one who in childhood always watched and worried over the two younger sisters, and still does. She is in a good, happy marriage with a quirky but kind and compatible man. Charlotte, however, marries a man, Geoffrey, who turns out to be a nasty, horrible, sadistic husband who ruins the lives of his wife and his children. Vera, the most beautiful one, marries a man who adores her, Brian, but whom she doesn’t really love. She enjoys the comfortable lifestyle Brian provides her, has a number of flirtations and even affairs, and finally her marriage crumbles. Her children are somewhat neglected, although they are better off than their cousins, Charlotte and Geoffrey’s children. Lucy is the one who tries to keep the family together and to help her sisters, but nothing she can do really changes things. She does manage, however, to help some of her sisters’ children. Despite the despair and sadness of parts of the story, there is the redeeming power of the love among the sisters, and especially of Lucy’s constant caring and efforts to help her sisters and their children. And it turns out that at least some of the children will survive and even be happy, despite their miserable childhoods. This novel is deeply compelling; I couldn’t stop reading it. The writing is impressive. I am quite sure I will be reading more of Whipple’s fiction very soon.

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

Belated (one day late) 200th birthday greetings to Charles Dickens! This great novelist has given so much pleasure to so many readers for so long. NPR.org had a nice article about Dickens' birthday yesterday, in which Linda Wertheimer quoted Dickens biographer Clare Tomalin as saying "After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters." Dickens' novels often contain 100 characters. Tomalin tells us that "David Copperfield" was Dickens' favorite of his own novels. In the same NPR article, novelist Jennifer Egan (a San Francisco native) reminds us how relevant Dickens still is. For example, she says, in 'Bleak House," "one of the major characters is [in] corporate litigation, and the way in which it consumes all kinds of people associated with it" is very relevant today. Egan goes on to get to the heart of the matter: the way Dickens' novels catch up and entrance readers. She tells of a a recent experience, in which "I was on a very bumpy plane ride, an overnight flight. I was so miserable, and I pulled out 'David Copperfield,' and I forgot how scared and tired I was, and I thought, 'This is what reading should be.' I'm utterly transported out of my current situation." Thank you, Charles Dickens, for your wonderful novels.

Guest Post: "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet," by James Ford

I am very pleased to introduce a guest post by my colleague, Sue Bae. Thank you, Sue, for this thoughtful review, below.

What started out as a consideration for some of my more advanced ESL students turned out to be a treat for me. James Ford’s debut novel, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” (Ballantine, 2009), though it probably won’t win any literary awards, is a poignant story of two innocents: Henry, a young Chinese American boy, and Keiko, a Japanese American girl, who meet and develop a deep friendship in the midst of the turmoil of the WW II years. Unlike for those around them, including Henry’s parents, race, ethnicity, and politics mean nothing to them except that they are what keep the two apart. I found myself cheering for the two, and urging them on in their valiant efforts to overcome the obstacles laid before them, the worst of which was Keiko’s family’s forcible imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp with the rest of the residents of Seattle’s Japantown. What I initially appreciated about the story was that there are no harsh words about or condemnations of the national policies that brought on such tragedies. It is Ford’s ability to keep politics out of his story that makes it so sweet and tender. (Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” comes to mind.) But I, and I’m sure other readers as well, could not help but taste the bitter, when reading that others merely looked on while guiltless people, innocents like Henry and Keiko, were stripped of their rights and homes, and other minority groups did nothing to help them in their common struggle for social justice. Henry’s father, one of many Chinese Americans trying to survive the times, has his son wear an “I am Chinese” button on his jacket to keep him from being mistaken for Japanese. He rages at Henry for hiding Keiko’s family treasures in his room for safekeeping, and does not speak to or acknowledge his son when he befriends a Japanese girl. Of course, this was all done out of fear. Through the bitter years of separation, Henry and Keiko live their lives as best they can, finding what happiness they can, just as countless people had to do in those times. Henry and Keiko’s story is, I believe, a testament to human resilience in times of struggle and the ability to find happiness even in wretched circumstances. Ford tells a very bittersweet tale of the history of his hometown and his heritage, and I believe Seattleites and those, like me, who hold the city in high regard, will enjoy reading about it. I have recently learned about another story about the internment of the Japanese, also told from a child’s perspective, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” by Julie Otsuka, which received very good reviews. [Editor’s note: This novel was the subject of a 1/15/12 post here.] One guess what my next bedtime reading will be.

"An Available Man," by Hilma Wolitzer

It is a well-known truth that widowers are soon presented with many opportunities for new romance and marriage. "An Available Man" (Ballantine, 2012), Hilma Wolitzer's new novel, focuses on this situation. Edward Schuyler's wife Bee has just died, and Edward, in his early sixties, is devastated. He and Bee had had a very happy, loving marriage. To deal with his grief, he tries to lose himself in his teaching and in staying involved in the lives of his mother-in-law and his young adult stepchildren. Those children, after a time, without Edward's knowledge or permission but with good intentions, put an ad in the personals section in the back of The New York Review of Books on his behalf. He is uninterested, yet tries to be a good sport and eventually meets a few of the many women who have replied to the ad. Suddenly the woman who had left him at the altar long before he met and married Bee comes back into his life. There are many complications, but finally there is a happy ending (but not the one you might predict). This novel is delightful and charming. Edward is a very human and very likable character, and some of the other characters are also well-developed and engaging; Edward's mother-in-law is one such, for example. One of the several things I like about this novel is its portrayal of older characters, and of the romantic relationships that older characters can and do have. "An Available Man" is an enjoyable and satisfying "good read," something Wolitzer is known for.

"Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary"

“Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) is startlingly similar to “In Zanesville,” which I reviewed here on 1/23/12. Both are about young teenagers (around 15 years old) moving between childhood and young adulthood, experiencing the pains and pleasures of high school, of young love, first kisses, drama, great fluctuations in moods, tiffs with friends, and more. “Tina’s Mouth,” written by Keshni Kashyap and illustrated by Mari Araki, is a West Coast, multicultural version of this classic “young girl coming of age” story. What makes it stand out is that it is a graphic novel. The device that shapes the story is that Tina is assigned in her honors English class to keep a diary in which she writes about her life and feelings as if in a letter addressed to Jean-Paul Sartre. A quirky device, to be sure, but somehow it works. In general, I am not drawn to graphic novels, but have read and enjoyed a few, such as Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” Gene Luen Yang’s “American Born Chinese,” and Posy Simmonds’ “Gemma Bovery” and “Tamara Drewe.” In “Tina’s Mouth,” the main character (Tina) is an Indian American girl living in Los Angeles. We get to know her parents, her older sister and brother, her best friend, her big crush, her English teacher, her partner in the play she stars in, and various other relatives and friends. In other words, within the confines of a graphic novel, Kashyap and Araki create a whole world and a whole cast of characters. One thing I particularly like, besides the realistic picture of a young girl’s moods, problems, and triumphs, is the way her ethnicity is portrayed. It is an important part of who she is, and we see that she is part of an extended community of Indian Americans. But she is not defined by her ethnicity; it is just one part of her identity. I am also intrigued by trying to figure out how much of the pleasure of reading this graphic novel is the words and how much is the illustrations. All in all, this graphic novel is charming and engaging.

"Someone at a Distance," by Dorothy Whipple

A few days ago (1/24/12) I wrote about my happy “discovery” of the English writer Dorothy Whipple, whose fiction had been popular in the mid-20th-century but fell out of fashion and was soon not easily accessible, until the wonderful Persephone Press republished her novels and stories in the past 15 or so years. In that post I wrote about Whipple’s short story collection, “The Closed Door.” Because I liked that book so much, I have now read one of her novels, her last one, titled “Someone at a Distance” (Persephone, 1999, but originally published by John Murray, 1953). This is a story of a happy marriage and family that is slowly and, it seems, inexorably destroyed by a snake in the garden in the form of a young French woman who has come to stay with the family, ostensibly to tutor the daughter in French. As readers, we watch with dismay as this beautiful but utterly selfish young woman, with no conscience whatsoever, takes what (and whom) she wants, with no regard for the devastation she leaves behind. The contrast between the original paradise and the ruins that follow is positively Biblical. The main character, Ellen, is a typical 1950s wife and mother, who happily builds her life around her husband, children, home, and garden. She is quite selfless and also quite naïve and unsuspecting that anyone could consciously come into her home and steal her husband and happiness. As a reader, I couldn’t help but like and admire Ellen very much, and feel sorry for her. I also admired that even after the ruin of her marriage, she managed to pick herself up and stay strong for the children and for her future. It is an old, old story, of course: the conniving female interloper, the husband who is too vulnerable to an attractive female’s paying attention to him, and the resultant drama and upheavals. But somehow Whipple manages to keep us interested and caring about how the characters live and how the story will turn out; she rewards us with a few twists and turns toward the end of the novel that are ambiguous but somewhat positive. As in the short story collection, the writing here is deceptively simple but lovely, and the insights into human motivations and behavior are “spot on,” as the British say, or at least used to say! I will definitely be reading more of Whipple’s fiction.

"An Angle of Vision," edited by Lorraine M. Lopez

I have written before, both on this blog and in my academic publications, of my interest in issues of social class. “An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots” (University of Michigan Press, 2009), edited by Lorraine M. Lopez, is a fascinating collection of essays. It speaks to my interest in women’s lives, writers’ lives, and social class issues as they are lived out by real people. The authors of these memoiristic essays are very generous in sharing their experiences and feelings, even when doing so is obviously very painful for them. As several of them remark, even though they know intellectually that it shouldn’t be so, they have often felt shame and secrecy about their class backgrounds and the poverty that many of them lived through. Now these women are established as writers and often as academics, but they never forget the legacy of their pasts. A common issue too is that many of them feel torn between two worlds: by virtue of their education and increasingly middle class lives now, they feel there are barriers between them and their families and past lives, yet they still don’t feel they truly “belong” in their current academic and writing lives, in their middle class lives. They often feel that in both situations they are just barely “passing,” and are imposters in both worlds. Some of these stories of childhood (especially), family, college years, and early careers are wrenching, even heartbreaking. Although reading these essays saddened and in some cases shocked me, I was grateful to the writers for allowing us readers these windows into their lives, and into the reality of the lives of so many in the United States, lives that are often forgotten, as the media and other venues prefer to present the façade that most Americans are middle-class and at least reasonably comfortable.