November 6, 2009
The Defiant Ones
Big thanks to the reader who pointed me towards “The Defiant Ones: Children’s books, parents and discipline” in The New Yorker. What do books including Ian Falconer’s Olivia Series, David Shannon’s No David, and Mem Fox’s Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild tell us about the current state of child-rearing? That apparently, parents are powerless, and kids are adorably manipulative. Admittedly, I think, this is a limited prism through which to view these books, but the article is still pretty fascinating. Recapped here, in blog form, with a slide show, oh my!
Oh, and Olivia. I really desperately admire that pig, and think that any little girl would do well to take on more than a few of her personality traits, except for any little girl that I’d have to live with, of course.
November 6, 2009
The new Nick Hornby novel is good!
A long time ago, before you were born, dude, when I was still single, and life was rubbish… I thought that High Fidelity was a romantic comedy. Part of this was because I wanted to marry John Cusack, of course, but it was also wishful thinking– that loving insensitive men who didn’t love you back could possibly constitute romance or even comedy, because I was really eager to construct for myself a personal narrative arc.
And then I grew up, but actually, I’d gone off Nick Hornby before that, when I made the mistake of tramping through Europe with only How to be Good in my backpack. Idiotic, I know. And I haven’t read anything he’s written since, until his newest novel, Juliet, Naked. My interest was sparked by this piece at the Guardian books blog, that the new novel was “not as predictable as you think”. And I really, really loved it.
Partly because FINALLY, a popular fiction book that isn’t just a mess of plot and character dressed up as a novel!! I’ve really lately been longing for the likes of this. And Nick Hornby has grown up too. He knows exactly what he’s doing here, doesn’t have to try too hard, and the result is remarkably assured. Juliet, Naked is funny, engaging, interestingly intertextual, smart and current. It is decidedly a Nick Hornby novel, so if you never liked him before, don’t bother, but if you liked him back when he did what does best– well, he’s done it again.
And I’m now barrelling through my to-be-read shelf. Before that, I finished My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier, which I enjoyed very much, and am now about to start my first Barbara Pym with Excellent Women.
November 5, 2009
Exploring the Other Side
I gave up hating newspaper columnists ages ago, and I don’t want Margaret Wente to be fired. But her recent essay on her new book only made clear to me the fundamental problem with her approach. People call her on being deliberately provocative, to which she thumbs her nose: “Would it be better if I deliberately set out to be inoffensive?” As though there were only the two extremes, and perhaps Wente is satisfied with making people angry, with provoking that response, but I can’t help think a great writer can do better than that. If conventional wisdom is really so off base, if “exploring the other side” is so important, shouldn’t she do it more carefully? Shouldn’t she actually “explore” instead of committing columnly acts of mischief? Has a Margaret Wente column ever changed anyone’s mind?
Provocation doesn’t make people think, rather, it puts up walls. Which is one reason I’m not as frightened as I should be by American right-wing media (but that might just be because I don’t have cable).
November 3, 2009
On poetry and verse
We’ve been delighting in verse since Harriet was born. We’ve read Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, When We Were Very Young, Jelly Belly and Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee, and we’ve just started Till All the Stars Have Fallen: Canadian Poems for Children. Reading the poems aloud has been tremendous fun, and Harriet likes to listen (most of the time), and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering poems I read years ago and reading many others for the first time– I’d never read the Eliot or A.A. Milne before. I do wonder, however, how much the fun we’re having with verse constitutes anything to do with poetry proper. Will the one lead to the other for Harriet, and for ourselves? And what’s the relationship between the two? Is verse the pop music of literature? How does one cultivate an appreciation for poetry in a child? By which I mean, what is the way from Macavity the Mystery Cat to Prufrock?
November 2, 2009
A tough time with popular fiction
Perhaps I’ve finally gotten clever, or the world’s gotten dumber, and I’m not sure which, but either way, I am having a tough time with popular fiction. Last Thursday, once again, I had to abandon a novel for being complete and utter crap. For being sloppy, poorly edited, not completely making sense, being implausible, and patronizing in that it was expecting me not to notice. At first, as I was struggling through, I put it down to the last three books I’d read before it having been difficult but also extraordinary, and maybe popular fiction in general just doesn’t bring the same return on investment. But no, actually. I’ve read some fine popular fiction this past while, that might not have demanded much of me as a reader but it didn’t ask me to kindly avert my eyes while it turned into a train wreck of a book either.
I feel that as a writer myself, who has written two significantly flawed (albeit not without their virtues but still, there is a good reason they’re unpublished…) novels, and many utterly awful short stories, maybe I’m just better attuned to a crappy book than the average reader. “Oh, I see what the writer did there,” I find myself thinking, and I wonder: why didn’t an editor pick up on this? Or do they still have editors? Perhaps they disappeared when the bottom fell out? And if so, could someone please get them to come back?
This post is far more grumpy than my usual fare, but I was annoyed. My reading time is hard-fought for these days. As I’ve noted already, I’m trading my daughter’s development of positive sleep habits for time to read, as I allow myself to be napped on, but her naps don’t come easy. And how will I answer when she grows up to ask me what I have to show for the shitty novels for which she sacrificed the ability to fall asleep anywhere but on her mother’s chest?
Or maybe I’m just crazy. Because I go searching the internet to validate my opinions, and I find that crappy novel of the day has received a glowing review in the New York Times (though never, I note, from Michiko Kakutani). And when I do blog searches, I find readers loving the stuff. There is usually a note, also, that says, “Would be great for book clubs.” Which, really, says nothing very good about book clubs.
I don’t think I’m crazy though. The UK papers tend to hate the books I do, and there is always a dissatisfied blogger for every enamoured one. Which goes to show, I suppose, that we all expect very different things from the books we read, but sometimes I do wish readers might expect a little more. And that editors would too, and publishers, and authors of themselves?
But, as Caroline Adderson once wrote (and I love this quote): “”Of course, the best antidote to the disappointment of the literary life is to read.” And I managed much consolation with a weekend spent with The Sweet Edge by Alison Pick and Tokyo Fiancee by Amelie Nothup, both of which I can earnestly recommend.
October 31, 2009
Dreams that Glitter
Something has changed during the two years since I was last in England, and I suppose you can blame it on what I now hear referred to as “the global economic shakedown”. It was unprecedented: I scoured the 3 for 2 tables at Waterstones, and could not find anything I wanted to read. One entire table was taken up by that Jane Austen zombie book and various take-offs of the same idea. There were a few good books, but I’d read them already, but all the rest were completely uninspired/uninspiring. And even those at full price seemed to mainly be the umpteenth volume of various celebrity autobiographies.
At the airport, we had pounds to burn, so we checked out WH Smith before our flight left. Their discount display was hilarious, and I really should have taken a photo. Books being promoted were as follows: Brick Lane, Catch 22, something by Enid Blyton, The Life of Pi, Fahrenheit 451 and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. It was the time-warp book promotion, and certainly nothing to get excited about.
When I lived in England, I could easily be cajoled into even a 6 for 4, no problem. All the books I wanted would be the ones on sale, and I’d be longing to read them after reading reviews in various newspapers’ respective stand-alone books sections. These books were irresistible, particularly with the discounts. And discounts are cheating at book-buying, I know, but I was looking forward to a little indulgence.
October 29, 2009
Its own mythology
“Every family in which children are read to, and where books are part of the furniture and the reading of them part of life, must have its own mythology, one that has arisen out of early books. Characters become companions, they help form the imagination, they people a child’s inner landscape. Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit, the Red Queen and the Caterpillar were far more to me than invented characters in a storybook. They still are. Looking at the children’s picture books now, I realize that they are my books too, they became as much part of my inner landscape as of theirs.”– from Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill
October 29, 2009
What Mothers Do
What Mothers Do by Naomi Stadlen is a very weird book. In one sense, it’s actually the most informative book on motherhood I’ve read yet. It’s almost a Scientist in the Crib for moms, decoding their behaviour to show that what goes on all day long is more profound than you’d ever suppose. That all of what a mother might spend her time doing during a day in which she “got nothing done” is full of significance, essential to her child’s development and therefore society at large via that next generation.
Stadlen posits that we lack the language to articulate what it is that mothers do. What mothers do badly, of course, we have all kinds of words for (overbearing, possessive, over-involved, negligent, narcissistic, heartless, cold, etc.), but no way to express anything between these two extremes. And it is this lack of vocabulary that undervalues a mother’s work, that she has no way to express what she has accomplished at the end of every day.
“People ask mothers: ‘Is he sleeping through the night yet?’ ‘Have you started him on solids yet?’ ‘Has he got any teeth?’ No one seems to ask: ‘Have you discovered what comforts him?’ Yet the ability to sleep through the night, or to digest solid food or to grow teeth, has little to do with mothering. Babies reach those milestones when they are mature enough, whereas being able to comfort depends on a mother’s ability.”
In her book, Stadlen points out what mothers’ do do. How their worlds are so completely shaken by the birth of their babies, cut off from matrilineal traditions that might have prepared girls for eventual motherhood. But how this “shaking up” opens up the mother to all the knowledge she will have to come by in order to get to know how to take care of her own specific baby. She expresses that to be a mother is to be “constantly interruptible”, which mothers begin to take for granted, which outsiders might find obnoxious or unhealthy, which is hard for a while not to resent. What mothers do as “comforters”, learning to soothe their babies through trial and error and after a while are able to do it without thinking. Tiredness that is absolutely uncurable. That it’s hard, terrible, and wonderful, and changes the way you relate to the world– to your partners, to your own mothers. Also to one another– Stadlen does a stunning job at pointing out the competitive and defensive dynamic in mothers’ conversations, the cycle of desperate talk which leads to a word of advice, and then mother recounts the reasons that advice won’t work which makes her sound more desperate and receive more advice and so it goes…
Stadlen claims to write without agenda, and I could read her book without throwing it out the window because her lack of agenda agreed with mine, but come on: “The literature on crying babies tends to focus on technique. However, responding to a crying baby involves more than technique. Underlying what a mother does is her philosophy of human nature… Her basic choice is either to see her baby as good, in which case she trusts him, or alternatively to see him as the product of evil human nature, or of original sin, which requires her to train him.” Parents who insist their children must sleep through the night, suggests Stadlen, are the product of a generation who were sleep-trained themselves so to be inflexible and now are unable to accommodate the basic needs of their young.
Unbelievable! As someone who is just too tired at 3:00 am to do anything but feed the baby whilst sleeping, I eat this stuff up with a spoon, but it’s terrible! And perhaps what I get for reading a book by a psychotherapist.
Her chapter on maternal love is also problematic. She cites recent literature challenging notions of maternal love, and new ideas of “maternal ambivalence”. Stadlen is troubled by assertions that all women actually experience these feelings, because she hasn’t found this in her years of working with new moms. She is troubled further by the idea of “maternal ambivalence” itself, but this (I believe) is because she understands it as women feeling hatred towards their babies. From what I’ve read on the subject (which is everything I can get my hands on), it’s far more complex than that– rather that whilst loving their babies, women can be amazingly unfulfilled as mothers, or rather not completely fulfilled, and yet the all-consuming nature of motherhood makes other ventures difficult. Also, that spending a day alone and exhausted, hormonally jacked up, being puked on and cried at, is utterly horrible, full stop.
Stadlen seems to think there is no end to what a mother’s comfort can provide. She also thinks that babies always cry for a reason, and that these maternally ambivalent women just couldn’t get past their own selves to figure out what that reason was and tend to it– I’m not convinced. Stadlen is right to counter the “bad mother” trend that is too ubiquitous in current writing about motherhood, but I don’t think all women are naturals when it comes to mothering. Part of this is because mothering is not valued in our society, as Stadlen sets out in her book and as she seeks to rectify with her explanation of mothers’ doings, reclaiming the art of it all.
So it’s a shame, because the women who’d probably most benefit from the fascinating and wonderful things she has to say about motherhood will find themselves attacked here.
