August 30, 2022
More Vacation Reads
For the second summer in a row, we’ve gotten away for two one-week-holidays at a cottage, and I feel so lucky that this is possible for us and will go out of my way (if necessary) to continue to make it so because it’s just the very best thing, so relaxing and restorative, which has been the theme of my summer in general, and what a gift. And not just because I got nine whole books read!
The first was The Smart One, by Jennifer Close, which I stole from the resort library of the cottage we stayed at in July (though I left two books in its place, so that’s okay, right?). Since reading Marrying the Ketchups in July, I’ve been wanting to launch a Jennifer Close kick, because I enjoyed it so much. The Smart One, her second novel, is similarly a book about adult children coming home again after failures to launch, and it started out fine enough, very typical commercial fiction fare, I thought, but then I started to notice the thread of thoughtfulness that wound the different parts of this story together, and the questions the book asked about what it means to be “the smart one” or “the pretty one,” and the impossibility of any woman making the right choices. Surprise pregnancies, Catholic guilt, people called Cla(i)re and the ties that bind were introduced in this novel, themes that would appear in subsequent books I read.
In Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, the pregnancy is not, in fact, a surprise, but what is a surprise is that Clare’s husband announces he’s leaving her right after their child is born. (He didn’t want to mention it before, because it might have been a risk to her health then.) And so Clare decides to pack up her London life and head home to Dublin, to the house that she grew up in with her legion of sisters, and there she proceeds to drink away her pain and then plot her way toward a better life, so that when her husband finally appears to win her back he’s not really sure what’s happened. I will confess that this is not the best Marian Keyes book I’ve ever read—and I found it in a Little Free Library anyway, so no matter. It was entertaining enough but also utterly implausible—Clare’s newborn baby seems remarkably independent and leaves her mother with plenty of time and space to explore her own needs, which was certainly not my postpartum experience. I also found it very amusing when everyone in this book from 1996 worries that their bum looks big from the vantage point of the 2020s when big bums are all the rage and unflattering jeans are where it’s at. This book was something of a relic but also a perfect diversion for a summer’s day.
Next I read Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, which was the odd man out of these books in many ways (such as, I didn’t find in a Little Free Library), but had more in common with Marian Keyes’ Watermelon than you might imagine (and intersected with Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in interesting ways). It’s true that this is not a novel about ties that bind, instead it’s about being free of those ties, which doesn’t always feel like freedom. Intimacies is a novel about exile, about belonging nowhere, and features a protagonist who’s dating a man whose wife has left their family, inviting some of the parallels to the Keyes. It’s a curious and alienating novel, one just a little too cold and precise for my liking, but that’s not a criticism, just taste.
After that I read Siracusa, by Delia Ephron, who I’ve never read before, and I think I found this book as a secondhand bookshop. It’s a novel, like Intimacies, with an atmosphere that feels oppressive, but far more revealing, and actually intimate. Could be described as a taut thriller, but it’s weirder than that, about two couples who travel to Italy together and whose lives seemingly unravel on the journey with players being played and too many secrets threatening to be revealed. Quick and eerie, I really liked it.
And remained by the Ionian Sea for my next book (or at least it’s beginning), Julia Glass’s Three Junes, which I knew nothing about, except that it won the National Book Award in 2002, and my friend Marissa recommended it to me (and she never steers me wrong). I loved this book, which comprises three distinct sections—the first of Scottish widower Paul on a Greek holiday months after the death of his wife; the second from the perspective of Paul’s son Fenno, a NYC bookseller coming home to Scotland after the death of his father five years later; and the third set five years after that when a character we glimpse in the first section meets Fenno on Long Island where she is accidentally pregnant (and there’s a pro-life activist; curiously, there is not an abortion in any of the books I read in this bunch, truly a holiday indeed) and waiting for her boyfriend to return home from Greece so she can tell him about the baby. This novel is a bit strange, and its connections aren’t always clear, but I found it utterly absorbing.
And then I read Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido, which blew my mind. I read Trapido’s reissued debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack, when we were in the UK in April, and while I enjoyed it, it was so unlike anything else I’ve read before that I had trouble placing it in my mind. This novel, written more than thirty years later, is helping me do so, however, because it’s brilliant. Ostensibly a coming of age novel set in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, it manages to be a fascinating (and hilarious) character study, story of a family, but also the most interesting history of South Africa I’ve ever read at once. (In her notes at the end of the book, Trapido explains that the forty years that she’s spent in the company of her husband, Stanley Trapido, a professor of South African history at Oxford, certainly informed her point of view.) I learned so much from this book, but it was also delightful, and now I am officially Barbara Trapido-obsessed.
All the while we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the car on audiobook—it was so good!! We all kept coming up with reasons to go somewhere just so we could get in the car again and hear what happened next. Truly a delight for the whole family, even Stuart, who had watched the movie recently so had a good idea of what was coming.
And then I read Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, which I purchased at the Toni Morrison event I attended at Luminato in June, and like everything associated with that event, it was just so fantastic. As unfathomable as it seems, a novel about urban foxes in London, coyotes in the northeastern United States, and PTSD from war in Sierra Leone, amongst many other things, the novel becomes a study of wildness, of humanity, of love and goodness. Part of it also spoke directly about my own anxiety, my fear of hardship and suffering, a fear of trauma which is seemingly a condition of white, middle class, privileged people in the West, which might cause us to turn our backs on those for whom trauma is lived experience. And trauma also doesn’t have to be destiny—it changes one, but it doesn’t necessarily leave one damaged, as psychiatrist Attila explains. There’s so much to unpack here, but I’m looking forward to reading it again and getting to work.
And finally, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which I’d saved for the end, something light and easy, another seaside book with Catholics, accidental pregnancy and someone called Clare, though it was probably the most forgettable of the bunch, so I’ll leave it at that.
Hooray, hooray for holiday reading.
