RIP Judy Brady

No, Judy Brady wasn’t a famous writer. But she wrote one short and very powerful essay that rapidly became a feminist classic: “I Want a Wife” (sometimes found under her married name, Judy Syfers). This essay, which was published in 1972 in the first issue of Ms. Magazine, and was republished countless times in various anthologies and college textbooks, dramatically and in detail made the point that women could be much more devoted to and successful at their educations, careers and other outside pursuits if, like men, they had wives to take care of all the labor of domestic life. Who wouldn’t want a wife who would cook, clean, care for one’s children, keep track of appointments, organize one’s social life, and take care of one’s emotional and sexual needs? These and many other details of family life were, at the time Brady wrote, considered the expected work of wives. Unfortunately, to varying degrees, these are still considered by many to be the duties of wives. Believing the essay to still be highly relevant, I taught it in a class as recently as two years ago. Brady was, however, not a one-note writer (although that is such an important note!); she was an activist and fought for various social justice causes such as health and the environment, edited two books, and wrote many articles. I was sad to see in the San Francisco Chronicle’s death notices that Judy Brady, who was born in and a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, died on May 14, 2017 at the age of 80. Thank you, Judy Brady, for your activism and your writing, and for the way you dedicated your life to social justice and to equality for women.

"Saints for All Occasions," by J. Courtney Sullivan

J. Courtney Sullivan has won me over again and again with each of her dramas of friends and families, all sweeping novels: “Commencement” (2009), “Maine” (2011), “The Engagements” (2013), and now “Saints for All Occasions” (Knopf, 2017). In each case, I was a little suspicious of the novels’ being “chick lit” (not that I necessarily have a problem with that genre, if indeed it is a genre, although I do have a problem with the label, as I have written about before with ambivalence…). All four novels tell good stories, ones that make you want to keep reading (for example, I read this latest 300+ page novel in one and a half days during a long holiday weekend); they are about well-developed characters, they have a strong sense of place, the stories play out over many years, they are realistic and compelling, and -- very important to me -- relationships are always the focus. The two main characters are sisters, Nora and Theresa, who leave Ireland in the 1950s as very young women to go to the United States in search of better lives. The story tells something of their lives in Ireland, but most of the novel is set in the U.S., especially Boston and surroundings, with brief side trips to Vermont and to New York. We get to know the sisters’ many relatives, and we see their lives diverging after a dramatic event, a secret that affects the sisters and other family members for decades. Well-delineated are the spouses, children, houses, jobs, lives and deaths in the story, all extraordinarily vivid and real. Nora is a particularly vivid presence. A bonus and a very good sign for me was the blurb by one of my favorite authors (see my very recent post of 6/3/17), Richard Russo, in which he called “Saints for All Occasions” “strong and wise and beautiful and heartbreaking.” If Richard Russo says so, I will never argue, and after reading this compelling novel, I have no inclination to do so.

"Bad Dreams and Other Stories," by Tessa Hadley

I am really on a roll! After reading the short story collections discussed in my last two posts, both so terrific and both displaying such deep knowledge of human nature, I have been fortunate enough to hit a triple (yes, StephanieVandrickReads can use sports metaphors!). Another of my favorite writers, Tessa Hadley, has an excellent new book of short stories out: “Bad Dreams and Other Stories” (HarperCollins, 2017). Author of several wonderful novels and short story collections, including her compelling recent novel “The Past” (see my post of 2/27/16), Hadley always leaves me with (as I put it in another earlier post on Hadley) that “Wow!” feeling readers experience on encountering writing that is original, exciting, real, and both new and deeply familiar. Hadley is English, and these stories take place in England. They focus on the seemingly small moments of everyday life, small moments that reveal larger truths. Themes include secrets, memories, fears, connections, families, childhood, marriage, sex, social class, and more. One common topic is the way children observe adults and adult life, and how children and adults are bound to misunderstand each other so often and in so many ways. Another is what it is like to leave home and live far away, and how disconnected to one’s family one sometimes becomes. As these last three sentences indicate, the stories are infused with all the ways that even loving families and friends can be mysteries and strangers to each other. This is of course sad, but in Hadley’s hands, the stories and emotions are always more complex than that. And not in an abstract way; the characters are always intriguing. These three short story collections that I have read and posted on most recently remind me of how much I, although my first love is novels, am drawn to short stories as well, when the practitioners of that art are as brilliant as authors Elizabeth Strout, Richard Russo, and Tessa Hadley.

"Trajectory," by Richard Russo

A new book by Richard Russo is always cause for excitement. What a wonderful writer he is! I was not surprised to hear from a writer friend who has spent time with Russo that he is as kind and approachable a person as his fiction would lead us to believe. I know, I know, one should not confuse the writer and the writing, but when such decency and understanding of human nature comes through so clearly in the writing, the reader feels that the writer must be a good person. I have so enjoyed and appreciated Russo’s novels, such as “Empire Falls,” “That Old Cape Magic,” and “Everybody’s Fool,” as well as his memoir, “Elsewhere.” The new book, the one that I have just read, is “Trajectory” (Knopf, 2017), a collection of four stories. This fiction is, as always with Russo’s work, engaging, compelling, deeply grounded in his knowledge of humanity, and gently humorous, sometimes even outright comedic; see, for example, his hilarious and scarily on-point campus novel, “Straight Man.” And speaking of campus fiction, of added interest to me is that two of the stories in this current collection are about characters who are academics; both are in confusing situations. Actually all of Russo’s characters face confusing situations, and the stories are basically about how they face them, how they muddle through, caught between the past and the future, uncertain but somehow at least somewhat positive despite it all. The young female professor in “Horseman” is dealing with a student’s plagiarism, a topic that all of us in academe have to deal with. She is torn about the plagiarist and the plagiarism; at the same time we learn of the complexities of her marriage, her child with serious problems, and her relationships with other academics in her past and present. “Voice” is the story of a sort-of-retired professor who has become fixated on a disabled, brilliantly creative female student, but in a less predictable, less blameworthy, more complicated and interesting way than this might sound. In the main part of the story, he is on a tour in Venice with his brother, with whom he has a strained relationship, which becomes more strained during the course of the story. “Intervention” features illness, family history, and family relationships (often difficult). The story I liked least of the four was “Milton and Marcus,” about a screenwriter and his current and past history with movie people; however, a story I like least in a Russo collection is still a wonderful story; it is all relative. I highly recommend this book, as I do all of Russo’s books. If you haven’t discovered this terrific writer yet, please do find and read one of his novels or short story collections. P.S. In my last post (5/28/17), I spoke of author Elizabeth Strout’s work being strikingly “humane”; I could say the same of Richard Russo’s work. Reading these two books one after the other has reminded me once again of what riches contemporary fiction has to offer, if one looks in the right places.

"Anything is Possible," by Elizabeth Strout

The word I kept thinking of while reading Elizabeth Strout’s new book, “Anything is Possible” (Random House, 2017), was “humane.” There is so much wisdom, so much caring, so much understanding of human nature in this collection of short stories. As I type this description, I think it makes the book sound treacly, sentimental, and “inspiring” in an intentional, bestseller way; it is none of these things (although it is, happily, a current bestseller). Those who have read Strout’s other fiction, the most well known of which is “Olive Kittredge,” and the most recent of which is “My Name is Lucy Barton” (a 2016 novel, which I posted on here on 3/12/16), know that her work is far from overtly sentimental; it is bracingly down-to-earth and understated. The same can be said of this new book, a collection of somewhat interrelated stories, some of which include reference to the character of Lucy Barton. Strout writes of working class and poor characters, families, and towns, and of those who have escaped those lives but are still tied to them in many ways. They often think about their pasts, and about the family members they now rarely see. Some of the most poignant stories are those of such characters revisiting their pasts, their towns and family members, and of the mixed feelings they experience in doing so. They love their families yet feel disconnected from them in many ways; still, they want to maintain the connection, even when it seems tenuous or fraught. Although there are many sad and difficult events narrated, especially those from the past, there is also a deep connection among the characters, as well as satisfaction in doing what needs to be done, in surviving and even thriving despite difficulties. The stories in this book are thoughtful, intimate, slow paced, with less “plot” than thought and conversation and memory. The stories are beautifully written, and should be read slowly in order to savor them. They are unsparing, unsentimental, yet, as I wrote at the beginning of this post, deeply humane and therefore deeply satisfying to read. Strout’s fiction gets better and better with every new work published. Highly recommended.

"You Are Having a Good Time," by Amie Barrodale

In my last post (5/14/17) I “confessed” my incurable although vexed love of an English accent (posh version), along with many things English. Continuing in the confessional mode, I will admit (as I have before, although perhaps not this directly) that I don’t like “edgy” fiction. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say I don’t like fiction that is trying too hard to be “edgy.” It is a little difficult to define what I mean by that. Part of it is an experimental quality. But a larger part is a too-obvious effort to be slightly shocking, slightly off-kilter, slightly eccentric, but at the same time hip and cool. Often the novels or stories I refer to here feature somewhat kinky or slightly masochistic or reckless sex, but this is not the part I object to. I think the part that bothers me most is that these stories often feature young women with no sense of direction that lead aimless lives, meanwhile complaining about those lives but also flaunting their unconventionality. I fully admit that there is an intangible quality that I am trying to describe, and I may not be very successful at doing so. The reason I am thinking about this (again) is that I have just finished reading a short story collection by Amie Borrodale titled “You Are Having a Good Time” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). As the back-cover description states, “…the veneer of normality is stripped from her characters’ lives to reveal the seething and contradictory desires that fuel them.” The description goes on to say that this fiction is “startlingly funny and original.” I agree with the first part of the description, although I think it makes the stories sound more interesting than they are. I disagree with the second quotation, as to me the stories are neither funny nor original, except in a very superficial, trying-too-hard way. I also disagree with the back-cover blurb contributed by Mary Gaitskill (herself known for her edgy writing, which I admire although I can't really enjoy), which states that Barrodale is “witty, soulful, and sharp” and that this book is “delightful and touching.” (Here I will give the same disclaimer I often give when I am posting a negative “review”: I know I could never write even mediocre fiction myself. Despite this, I believe serious readers have the right to share their responses, negative and positive and everything in between, to what they read.) In the stories in “You Are Having a Good Time,” there are odd meetings between odd characters, too much drinking, semi-spiritual beliefs undermined by unwelcome desires, a ghost or two, a very unethical psychiatrist, strained relationships among family members and friends, a preoccupation with bodies and appearances, the semi-poverty of youth launching themselves into the adult world and figuring out their next steps, urban life, strange coincidences, the aforementioned sex, and more. I did keep reading to the end, so obviously I found something interesting in this story collection. But I was left with a feeling of the inauthentic. And whether fairly or not, I attribute much of that to what appeared to me to be the author’s trying too hard to be edgy, original, and unusual, but not succeeding in doing so.

Swooning over an English Accent

As a longstanding, inveterate Anglophile, I found on a very recent car trip that it was a wonderfully distracting delight to listen to Penelope Dellaporta read to me, via Books on Tape (1993), “Shroud for a Nightingale” (1971), by P. D. James. Her lovely, lilting English accent, in all its permutations as she read the voices of various characters, was music to these ears. The story itself, a mystery which I have read before, is compelling, even on a second read. Over a period of many, many years, I have read most if not all of P.D. James’ wonderful novels, both mysteries and otherwise. James, a hugely well-esteemed author who died in 2014 at the age of 94, wrote literary mysteries, books that were admirable and enjoyable far beyond the who-done-it aspect, as well as other novels. But as much as I have praised and want to praise again this author, and as much as I have praised and want to praise again the joys of listening to books on tape/CD, my main point here is how fascinated, delighted, and soothed I am by the English accent itself, which of course is reinforced by the English vocabulary and style found in England as opposed to in the United States, where I live. There are more traces of “English English” in my native Canada than here in the U.S., but still there are big differences. I feel some ambivalence about my rather predictable and romanticized worship of the English accent; I have spoken and written about this in my academic work, especially as it unfortunately implies, perhaps, a kind of colonial perspective. As a student of linguistics and especially sociolinguistics, I am also aware that there is not just one “English accent,” and further that the whole idea of “accent” is fraught with political and social issues. But, as Emily Dickinson said about love, “The heart wants what it wants,” and my heart is always rendered mushy by a certain classic type of English accent. For that matter, I have also had a decades-long literary crush on P.D. James’ fictional hero, the Scotland Yard chief detective ("commander" is his title) and poet (how romantic is that?!) Adam Dalgliesh, who is described as speaking beautifully. I know he is a fictional character but I would love to hear his voice. I guess it is time for me to peruse more British Books on Tape, more BBC, and more of a certain genre of PBS's Masterpiece (think "Downton Abbey").