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Privileged positions

I grew up near Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, a seaside suburb that rejoices in about 4 bookshops. When I'm back, I like browsing there and seeing the different ranges – it seems they’re not all dictated by Head Office like the stock in Waterstones et al. There is quite a mark-up on UK books, so a book costing £12.99 here might cost 18.99 euros, ie around £15.60. This seems a bit much, so I don’t always buy.



My hesitation over spending 19 euros would seem truly laughable to the main characters in The Privileges by Jonathan Dee. This fantastic novel begins with a wedding: golden couple Cynthia and Adam are getting married, age 22, the first of their friends to do so. The novel charts their ascent to dizzying financial success – Manhattan penthouse apartment, beach house in the Caribbean, charitable foundation, private jet – through underhanded dealings by Adam. Yet, without plot-spoiling, the novel doesn’t end with anyone in handcuffs. This has infuriated some reviewers, but isn’t life often like that? People get away with things.

This Observer review points out that the author shies away from judging or criticising his golden creations. I agree, though it’s worth observing a potential lesson in how their children turn out. Being given everything they could possibly want turns them, in daugher April’s case, into an empty-headed brat, and in son Jonas’s case, into an ascetic world-hater.

There's no denying that Cynthia and Adam are very interesting characters. They live for each other, and for the moment. They never look back. They never feel any self-doubt, or if they do, they stamp on it and move on. It should make me hate them, but it feels exhilarating, and admirable: perhaps because they’re the opposite to me, a novel-reading type who lies around worrying about 19 euros. It reminds me that characters don’t have to be likeable if they’re interesting.

The prose is a joy, and the first chapter is outstanding: one long cinematic scene that feels as if the author is on a giant dolly camera, tracking seamlessly from the bride to the brother of the groom to the wedding planner. It’s also very funny. In a blink-and-you’ll miss it vignette during the wild post-wedding party, Marietta, the bride’s best friend, has agreed to cater to her boyfriend’s sexual fantasies concerning the hotel gym (she rationalises: who’s to say what’s weird?). As he has his way, she finds herself recalling a line from The Godfather: ‘Someday, and that day may never come … I may call upon you to do a service for me …’

Prep

This week I started Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. When Otto Quangel's son is killed in battle, he starts dropping subversive anti-Nazi postcards all over Berlin. It's based on a true story (the scratchy writing on the great Penguin cover is based on the handwriting on the postcards) and was first published in 1947. The writing is really direct and informal, and it communicates the everdayness of life under Nazi rule ... the creepy, nosy neighbour might be about to report you for 'subversive talk' but he remains the sort of creepy, nosy neighbour character we can all recognise.




I could tell it was going to be excellent, but I wasn't quite in the mood for it this week - I wanted something a little less harrowing and more contemporary, but still brain-engaging ... so I've been devouring the wonderful Prep by Curtis Sittenfield. It's the story of a girl from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to an New England boarding school some time in the 1990s. Not a whole lot happens plot-wise, but Sittenfield is a wonderful writer and captures what it's like to be a painfully awkward adolescent whose inner reality is so at odds with the oustside world, and who's constructed innumerable rules to keep herself miserable: 'I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous ineraction.'

Here's Lee, the heroine, squirming in front of a well-meaning but misguided teacher who's kept her behind class and warned her not to be a 'cipher' but to feel strongly and engage with the world:

'She was wrong about everything, and her wrongness was, if absurd, also flattering. I was not disengaged, I was not disinterested, Aspeth certainly did not want to be my friend, and I was one of the least cool people I knew - all I ever did was watch other students and feel curious about them and feel dazzled by their breeziness and wracked by the impossible gaping space between us, my horrible lack of ease, my inability to be casual ... The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the US and China did not mean I didn't feel things. As for whether I was a cipher, that was more difficult to say because I didn't know what the word meant. But I would definitely look it up in the dictionary when I got back to the dorm.'

American Wife, also by Sittenfield, was one of my favourite books so far this year - it's a novel based on the life of Laura Bush, and when I say you finish it loving Laura Bush that will give you some idea of what an unexpected story it is. Prep is also excellent so far (100 pages to go) though I prefer AW. What a pity though that Prep is littered with typos, all punctuation - I found 3 on one page alone. I know the people working on it were probably overworked and underpaid, and it probably ran late and the author made changes at the last minute, but this is the PAPERBACK. You should be able to sort these things out by paperback stage. Still, loving the book.

Why happiness doesn't always write white: celebrating Elinor Lipman

The French writer Montherlant said that ‘happiness writes white’ – that is, it doesn't show up on the page; novels must be about bad things, angst, malaise. Martin Amis agrees: 'Only Tolstoy, perhaps, has made happiness swing.' Not so: step forward, Elinor Lipman.

This wonderful American author has never achieved marquee-top status here in the UK, but she’s built up a dedicated fan base that includes writers like Wendy Holden, Fay Weldon, Nigella Lawson, Carol Shields and Maggie O’Farrell. Her books are beautifully observed, wry and original social comedies. The Family Man is her latest novel, and I think it's one of her best.

Henry is a recently retired New York lawyer, successful, upstanding and lonely. He’s gay, but he’s also the straight man, literally, to his long-since ex-wife, the appalling and hilariously self-centred Denise. When Denise’s husband dies, she reclaims Henry (‘a gay ex is something of a status symbol’) and attempts to guilt him into becoming her unpaid legal consultant and the sounding board for her griefs, not over her husband’s demise but over his will. Meanwhile Henry is building a more rewarding relationship with his ex-stepdaughter Thalia, a struggling actress.

In this totally delightful book, Lipman explores the kind of relationships that most fiction overlooks. It is a joy to see Henry belatedly experience parenthood with Thalia, and to see her benefit from having a real father figure around. As a responsible textbook lawyer, Henry is both thrilled and appalled at the dramas caused by Thalia and her mother, whether it’s Thalia’s ‘fauxmance’ - publicity-stunt romance - with a horror film actor/director or Denise painting her apartment walls black to stop her stepsons selling it. But shrewd Lipman knows, and shows, that people’s bad points are also their good points: Denise’s crass match-making (described as ‘This one’s gay, and so’s that one’) means that Henry ends up in love with Todd, who works at Gracious Places selling table settings. Todd is fascinated by Thalia’s fauxmance; Henry charms Todd’s mother, and in a chain of strange events precipitated by the unfortunate Glenn Crouch’s death, previously lonely people are forging connections and having fun.

How does Lipman do this without becoming mawkish? It’s in the characterisation and in the beautiful, balanced, feather-light prose. Henry, meeting Todd’s mother Lillian, notices her slippers: ‘elf wear, toes crescenting upwards, embroidered with forget-me-nots. “Toddy! Bring a tray table,” she yells.’ Even a character who doesn’t appear – Thalia’s father – is captured to a T: Henry sees in her features traces of ‘his predecessor, the doomed biological father who fell off a mountain in Peru, who had been tall, long-legged, known to successive husbands as a photograph in the nursery: hands on his hips and a tolerant grin that seemed to say, Okay, I’m posing. Take your photo and let me get on with my adventures.’

Thalia’s fake publicity-stunt romance with the horror film star and director Leif (previously Larry) Dumont is inspired. Lots of it takes place off-stage, nonchalantly reported by Thalia to Henry over coffee the morning after or over dinner and drinks to Henry and Todd, but when Leif does appear he gives great value:

Leif is looking more and more to Henry like an undesirable upstairs neighbor. His forehead is high and bony, and he doesn’t appear to blink.
‘Leif now produces and stars in horror films,’ explains Thalia.
Henry raises his glass. ‘What fun,’ he says.
‘They’re not fun,’ says Leif. ‘They’re terrifying – which I say proudly.’

The denouement to the subplot about Thalia’s love life as charming as it is unexpected, and Lipman manages to show us exactly what Thalia’s final choice of suitor is like, and what he means to her, in the way he turns around: ‘a pivot and a smile – not a military about-face but a showman’s spin – and without question it makes Thalia laugh.’

So, read Elinor Lipman – you could start with The Family Man, or for more on families, Then She Found Me, or for more of a romance The Way Men Act. Without question she will make you laugh, and she’ll also make you happy. You might also want to read this thumbs-up from the Telegraph . though I re-read the last sentence a few times, thinking: has the word 'sophisticated' been mis-placed, or was it even meant to be there at all? The sentence would have a new meaning, and one I would agree with more, without it ...

Reader's block

Has this ever happened to you?

For a long time - say a few months towards the end of last year - I completely got out of the habit of reading. Of course, I was still reading books, one or two a week, but firstly they were mainly tried and tested favourites and secondly none of them were in any danger of taxing my brain. I was re-reading my comfort authors: Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Marian Keyes, and also Jilly Cooper (the short romances, not the blockbusters), Sophie Kinsella, Lauren Weisberger, Hester Browne and essentially anything I could read with my brain half-asleep.

There's nothing wrong with this kind of lazy reading, but it is addictive, and it can result in a kind of reader's block, where you become unable to face anything that looks even remotely difficult, or unfamiliar, or dense, and go running back to your comfort books. I managed to break my reader's block with a couple of books: one was was Lionel Shriver's Double Fault and one was Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. Both of these have strong narrative lines that led me out of my block, by promising me, in return for some degree of concentration, a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I couldn't have gone straight from Marian Keyes to, say, John Banville's The Sea (beautifully written and not much happens, by all accounts).

I don't think comfort reading is something that other people can recommend to you - you have to find your own comfort books. But it probably helps to receive some recommendations for reader's block. Is anyone out there feeling blocked at the moment? Stuck in a rut? If so, I hope to recommend some books to help ... stay tuned.