June 12, 2009

A Novel Gift

Stuart and I both like the song “Daughter”, but the lyric “everything she owns, I bought her” doesn’t really apply to our situation. It’s more like, “That’s our daughter in the water, everything she owns was a gift from our extraordinarily generous friends and family.” She gets packages in the post near daily, always full of delightful things. We feel so lucky and appreciative of these gifts, and all the thoughts and good wishes we’ve received. Harriet lacks for nothing, no thanks to us really. Our freezer is also similarly stocked.

But one gift does stand out a bit. In addition to adorable summer outfits, Harriet’s Auntie Jennie also gave us a novel. Or, gave me a novel. It was Catherine O’Flynn’s novel What Was Lost, which I’ve wanted to read for ages. And this novel gift really was particularly novel, because nobody ever gives me books. Oh, as I’ve said, people give me lots of things, but I’ve read so many books already and my tastes are quite defined that friends are more inclined to give me other things. So that rarely do I ever receive a book as a surprise, let alone a book I’ve been dying to read anyway. I imagine I’m not the only bookish sort who suffers from this plight. Oh, the tortured problems of the middle class…

June 9, 2009

Out of Time

I’m now rereading Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, prompted by the Harriet/Hatty character within (though ours will be a Hattie, we think, when she’s at home). And the book is more pertinent to my current experience than I would ever have imagined, though it could be said that my mind is so mushy and needy that I could be identifying with pretty much anything right about now. But Tom’s isolation speaks to me, and his insomnia, and the secret world he creeps about in at night when everyone else is asleep. The secret world wherein the clock strikes thirteen, and I feel like I’ve been there lately, up with the squalling baby who refuses to eat properly or be satiated. “Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.”

I loved this book as a child, absorbed as I was by all stories of time travel. From Back to the Future to Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, and many more I’ve surely forgotten. It’s odd because I’ve never liked science-fiction or fantasy in my fiction, but this one element of genre fiction, I’ve always found so irresistible. Perhaps because the alternate world it plays with is still the very one we live in, which is really the only one that ever interests me, however out of time.

June 6, 2009

Clearest, starkest brilliance

“Motherhood is a storm, a seizure: It is like weather. Nights of high wind followed by calm mornings of dense fog or brilliant sunshine that gives way to tropical rain, or blinding snow. Jane Louise and Edie found themselves swept away, cast ashore, washed overboard. It was hard to keep anything straight. The days seemed to congeal like rubber cement, although moments stood out in clearest, starkest brilliance. You might string those together on the charm bracelet of your memory if you could keep your eyes open long enough to remember anything.” –Laurie Colwin, from A Big Storm Knocked It Over

That I’ve read an entire book over the past twelve days means that all is not lost. And indeed, there have been numerous “moments standing out in clearest, starkest brilliance,” though these don’t include the hours we spent in the Sick Kids Emergency when Harriet when just four days old (she was fine, thank goodness, but that experience was like staring straight into hell), her much too-much weight loss that has had both of us struggling to make up for it ever since, that I may have cried as much as she has, and the overwhelming dread at the thought of her Daddy returning to work on Monday. But we’ve enjoyed taking her out for her first walks in her carrier, trying to figure out what she likes (not much, but we suspect being in her carrier is a comfort), getting massages from Daddy, midwife visits where she’s gained an ounce every day, the sun shining through the windows, all the support we’ve had from family, friends and our most excellent neighbours, and that she’s received so good wishes from all over the world. Harriet has also received post every day, though she’s not yet old enough to realize how exciting that is. We’ve also been fortunate that I’ve come through my surgery so well and easily. My crush on the surgeon went into high gear in the days after her birth (which, in spite of the operating room, was as gorgeous as any birth could be, and I don’t feel I’ve missed anything) because he looked like Paul Simon circa 1970s, and because of what a good job he’d done, and what a beautiful baby he’d delivered (though about three nights ago at three o’clock in the morn, I was sorely tempted to go firebomb his house). It’s been a very difficult time for all of us this past while– I’ve never been much inclined to work hard at things I’m not loving, and this isn’t a job I can pass along to anybody else. Though I’m finding, ever-increasingly, those moments standing out in clearest, starkest brilliance when I don’t want to.

May 31, 2009

A fondness for Baskerville

“And Jane, I’d like a beautiful typeface. Devinne or maybe Bembo.”
“We can’t get them,’ said Jane Louise. “I can get you Garamond or Caslon.” She doodled on her pad. Erna was a fountain of little-used or almost extinct typefaces. Jane Louise believed that Erna spent her nights browsing through old type spec books, and Jane Louise was not entirely wrong.
“Oh, these beautiful olds fonts,” Erna said. “What a tragedy.”
“It’s nothing compared to teen pregnancy and wife beating,” Sven said. “I’m sure Janey can get you Bembo for display type.”
A few minutes later Erna withdrew to the editorial floor, leaving Jane Louise with an enormous, untidy manuscript.
“I wonder if old Alfred slaps her around,” Sven said. “Jesus, it’s like having a whole stable of nervous horses in there. I wish she’d shut up about type. It just goes to show that girls are ruined by reading. Even her nasty children have opinions on these subjects. She told me that her oldest had a fondness for Baskerville.”
“All fourteen year olds do,” said Jane Louise.
–from A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin

May 31, 2009

What life has been like lately…

I’d post a picture of me and the baby, but as I’ve ceased to wear clothes, I’ve got none that are presentable. Harriet doesn’t wear clothes either, but she pulls it off much better. We’re now inhabiting a Harriet-centric universe, and we like it here. She’s fitting into the family very well, and we’re working hard to get her fatter. Her daddy is so wonderful to both of us, it makes me cry. She looks so much like him that it’s a bit startling, and she’s so beautiful that we can’t stop talking about it. We also can’t stop singing her “Ignition Remix” by R. Kelly, which may have a detrimental effect in years to come. But regardless, I continue to be a very lucky lady.

Psst: Harriet is after the spy, of course. I’ll be writing more about that later.

May 28, 2009

Baby Harriet

Harriet Joy was born Tuesday May 26th at 8.30 am. She is perfect and her rather smitten parents are learning all the time. We love her and get to take her home tomorrow, we hope. Thanks for all the good wishes.

May 25, 2009

What life has been like lately…

Because I am a very lucky lady. And now we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.

I’ll be back when I’m ready. I’ll miss you until then.

May 25, 2009

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

Fairy tales can be as tricky as the shadowy creatures inhabiting them, and at a Midsummer Party in 1895, the children of Todefright Hall discover just how much in A.S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book. These children are the Wellwoods, progeny of children’s writer Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey who is a Fabian banker (neither he nor Olive too uncomfortable with contradictions such as that). The children have just impressed by a terrifying performance of Cinderella by sophisticated puppets, and are intrigued by the differences between the story they’re accustomed to and what they’ve just seen (Cinderella’s stepsisters hacking apart their feet to make the slipper fit, and no fairy godmother or magic pumpkin coach). So it turns out there are many different versions of the stories the children know, and this one is by the Brothers Grimm.

The story wasn’t exactly scary, one of the children remarks. Among the grown-ups present in this Bohemian circle is a scholar of fairy tales who agrees, “It should be scary, there was a lot of blood. [But…] these were memories of some other time, long ago, and… they weren’t scary./ ‘They are just like that,’ said Griselda [the child], feeling for what intrigued her, not finding it.” “Like that”, being precisely what they are; not meant to entrance, to sanitize, to edify, to terrify. Folk tales, not children’s tales, which means not geared to any particular audience, and therefore resonating wider.

But these are children who’ve been reared on fairies, whose parents are idealists committed to keeping magic alive in their own lives. Into this circle has also come Philip Warren, a working class boy run away from the potteries, discovered in the basement of the South Kensington Museum (which is to become the Victoria and Albert), and his presence does provide balance and make clear that the Wellwoods’ privilege is rarer than these socially aware children might imagine. But of course Philip is taken with the Wellwoods, and their wild existence, scrambling up trees, riding up and down lanes on bicycles, by the personal stories their mother has written for each of them, by the way that each one of them is his or her own particular sprite.

The difference between the fairy tales the children are accustomed to, the stories their mother writes, and the “like that” stories of the Brothers Grimm is that the latter does not attempt to make itself of another world. Olive Wellwood’s stories are meant to be as “through the looking glass”, but as the story progresses, we see that life itself really is rather “tale-ish”: boys found hidden down hidey-holes, children who appear to be changelings, dubious parentage among the offspring of the Wellwoods and their freewheeling circles, Bluebeardy locked doors with terrible secrets behind them, and vanishings without any explanation.

So that when the children venture out into the world, they find they’ve been sorely deceived. The world is not a firefly-chasing idyll, and the monsters aren’t all fiction– the abuse sustained by Tom Wellwood at public school traumatizes him for the rest of his life, turning him into a Peter Pan type character. The girls grow up to see that for all their scrambling and rambling, society (and their parents) expects something very conventional about the kind of women they’re mean to be. They begin to recognize their parents’ infallibilities, and are taken aback by a world more complex than a good-queen/bad-queen dichotomy. And then comes World War One, into which the boys are led by some kind of Pied Piper, by leaders suffering from “the childish failure to imagine the world as it was” (when “the world as it was” is precisely “like that”).

The Children’s Book is a big book in which time passes quickly, and the reading is gripping. Similarities to Byatt’s best-known work Possession have been made for good reason, though this doesn’t mean the author is simply replaying an old game. She has embarked upon something sprawling here– a story about the invention of childhood, about artistry and artfulness, about motherhood, and the status of women, all with an enormous cast of characters, most of whom are made to be tremendously alive. The novel also stands up as historical fiction, though I don’t like to use that term about books I like and I loved this one– there is nothing dusty, sepia-toned about it. The Children’s Book is decidedly vivid and surprising.

It is true that by the end of the book, Byatt’s immersion of her characters into historical events has perhaps become a bit too complete and the pages sweep by lacking the specificity we’ve seen in the earlier part of the novel. But so too did history seem to in the early twentieth century, and maybe we can understand it this way. Perhaps it’s also the way that time goes when children are grown too, a single day holding far less possibility in and of itself, pages turning faster. Towards the end of the 600+ page novel, but this is the sort one is sad to get to the end of. And here Byatt offers us the possibility of some light, of a happy ending at the end of four years’ bloodshed, and so we can dare to hope too that life and the world could also be like that.

May 22, 2009

Yellow House

Our house is being painted. Anyone who knows our house will also know that this is very good news. That no longer will we live in the shabby blue house, but in the freshly painted yellow one. I think this counts as upward mobility. We are very excited, and glad Baby won’t have to be embarrassed at its premises. We’re also getting a great deal on the painting (ie we’re renters, and so someone else is getting the bill). The only downside is that the last few days I’ve had to endure such disconcerting sights as this one.

May 22, 2009

Books Without Which

Here is a list of books without which I would have had to imagine up my own anxieties throughout my pregnancy. Thankfully, however, these works came with their own inspiration.

• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: Willie Upton returns to her hometown “in disgrace”, and what happens in her pregnancy is a plot hinge I’ll not here reveal, but you should read the book to find out why I thought I was crazy.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: We wanted to find out our child’s gender, but nobody would tell us. So ever since I’ve been convinced that it doesn’t have one. Time will tell.
• Like Mother by Jenny Diski: A baby without a brain! It can happen! It happened to Diski’s Frances, but she was horrid, but then sometimes I am too.
• The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing: The Lovett’s fifth child is a monster who destroys the family, not to mention kicks the crap out of poor Harriet’s womb. The perils of banking too much on domesticity and cozy kitchen tables.
• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins: The pregnancy goes just fine, and baby Arlo is a dream, but the whole experience brings Ann’s repressed demons back to the surface. I don’t actually have repressed demons, but what if they’re just really repressed?
• Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. Speaking of demons. Because how can you be sure your baby is not the spawn of Satan? And I mean really sure.
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Was it nature or was it nurture? Regardless, somewhere along the line Eva went wrong, and brung herself up a high school killer. And it could happen to you (ie me).
• The Baby Project by Sara Ellis. I actually read this book twenty years ago, but skimmed through it recently in a book store because I thought it might be cute. No. SIDS, oh my, and then I started to cry. So the anxiety isn’t going to stop with the birth, it seems. No bumpers on the crib for Baby!
• The Girls by Lori Lansens. I didn’t read this while I was pregnant, so didn’t notice the potential trauma of the birth scene, but then I gave it to a friend who was pregnant, and let’s just say she was plenty relieved to see just one head and four limbs at her first ultrasound.
• Consequences by Penelope Lively. If I read a lot of 19th century literature, surely I’d see even more mothers dying in childbirth. Which is one reason I’m really glad that I don’t read a lot of 19th century literature.