Country Life

I knew Michael Frayn's work as a playwright, but until I stumbled on Headlong I didn't know he was also a novelist. I have seen two of his plays – “Noises Off” and “Copenhagen” - and they couldn't be more different. The first is an hilarious slapstick comedy about the performance of a dreadful play, viewed from both in front of and behind the curtain.. The second is a serious play based around an event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941, a meeting between the renowned physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. So which would the novel be like – the slapstick farce or the serious history-based study? The answer is that it is both.

The novel's narrator, philosophy professor Martin Clay, has arrived for an extended stay at his country house, accompanied by his wife and baby daughter. His goal is to complete a book he is writing about “the impact of nominalism on Netherlandish art in the fifteenth century”. But Martin is easily distracted, and when country neighbor Tony Churt invites them for dinner at his estate, he accepts. Here's Frayn's succinct description of Tony's rundown mansion: “The Churts' tasteful avoidance of ostentation verges on the garish”.

The real motive for the dinner invitation soon emerges – Tony has several paintings that he wants Martin to help him evaluate and sell on the sly, including one that he has been using to block up a fireplace. Martin suspects that the sooty painting is a Bruegel, but instead of telling Tony, he devises an elaborate scheme in which he will help Tony sell the other paintings and keep the maybe-Bruegel for himself. Martin's powers of rationalization are astounding (...”he owns it no more than I do. No one can own a work of art.”) and what follows is an amazing mixture of Frayn's dual talents for comedy and erudition. On the one hand, I learned more about the art, religion and history of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century than I ever thought possible. But the comedy of errors involving a country house, paintings, dogs, mud, a vicar, a flirtatious wife, an angry brother and a beat-up Land Rover is as funny and farcical as “Noises Off”.

In the end the book is funny and sad, a serious examination of human pride and greed, a detective story where the clues keep shifting, and a delicious comedy of country life.

Being Different

Lucy Grealy was an award-winning poet and a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her close friend and roommate at both Sarah Lawrence College and Iowa was Ann Patchett, author of “Bel Canto”. Lucy Grealy’s memoir “Autobiography of a Face” was published in 1994. Lucy Grealy died in New York City at the age of 39.

When she was nine years old Lucy Grealy collided, in the playground, with another girl hitting their faces into each other. The pain Lucy felt went from a tooth ache, to a fractured jaw, to a dental cyst. The final diagnosis was “Ewing’s sarcoma”, a potentially terminal cancer. Lucy Grealy tells a story of strength and suffering. She endured almost three years of radiation and chemotherapy, driving with her mother from a suburb to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City five days a week for treatments. What this child endured is difficult to comprehend. When she cried her mother told her to be strong. But she couldn’t figure out how to do that.

She finally returned to school with a third of her jaw removed. The cruelty of children faced with someone who is different is hard to understand. Lucy Grealy states, “It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”

She went on to endure over thirty reconstructive procedures on her face before she came to terms with the fact that she was finally whole. The journey was a painful one for Lucy Grealy but one she was able to write about with eloquence and wit. She suffered with huge physical pain, the constant pain of being different and an overall feeling of loneliness and being unlovable. She went on to be a successful poet and writer. This memoir is one that will be very hard to forget. It leaves the reader with feelings of overall sadness that our society has so much difficultly accepting someone, even a child, who looks “different”.

The memoir has a wonderful Afterward by Ann Patchett that gives the reader some insight into the adult Lucy Grealy. Lucy Grealy’s memoir is a great story about finding one's true self when faced with insurmountable adversity.

Under One Roof

I've enjoyed Antonya Nelson's short stories in the New Yorker for a number of years but I'd never read any of her novels. Sometimes a great short story writer disappoints me as a novelist (Alice Munro and Eudora Welty come to mind), so I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up Living To Tell.

The book covers a year in the life of the Mabie family of Wichita, Kansas and it opens with a powerful scene. Thirty-three year old Winston Mabie is returning home after five years in prison for manslaughter, the result of a drunk driving accident in which he killed his grandmother. He returns to a large rambling house where his parents and two adult sisters live. His older sister Emily is a recently divorced mother of two young children, and younger sister Mona is an underemployed depressive with bad taste in men. The father, a retired history professor, is secretly grieving over the imminent death of his teaching colleague and best friend Betty, and Mrs. Mabie is losing both her vision and her connection to the rest of her family. The plot also includes a crazy uncle, a pregnant teenager, and a kidnapped dog. Can you say dysfunctional?

But Nelson is a witty and insightful writer, and although her characters may sound less than likable, she is fond of them all and gives each some space to reveal their better selves. There were moments when I felt that I was reading a set piece which had been dropped into novel (kind of like an embedded short story?), but she presents a funny, unsentimental but heartfelt view of an American family.

A Time to Revolt

Being 51 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, and lately in the number 1 spot, is in itself a strong recommendation. The book with this recommendation, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett, is a very good read and a book that is difficult to put down.

The story takes place in Jackson Mississippi in 1962 (not that long ago!). Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan has just graduated from Ole Miss with a degree in English. But to the consternation of her mother, Skeeter has no engagement ring or even a boyfriend. Skeeter has other ideas for her future. She wants to be a writer and she answers an ad for an editing job at the “The Ladies Home Journal“. The senior editor writes back to tell Skeeter she needs some experience, and if she wants to write, “Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else”.

What Skeeter wants to write about is, what it is like to work as a black maid in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962. The story that follows is a page turning, gripping novel about the racial divide in this country. Skeeter’s friends, her bridge partners, and fellow members of the Junior League are all young married women. They employ black women to clean their houses, cook their meals and raise their children. But they are racists who won’t allow their maids to use the toilets in their houses.

One by one, Skeeter gets 10 black women to agree to tell their story. The heart and soul of “The Help” are two black maids, Aibileen who has raised 17 white babies and lost her own son, and her best friend Minny, who loses job after job because she talks back when she is insulted. Their stories are heartbreaking as they share the narration with Skeeter.

Kathryn Stockett has written a moving story using the black vernacular of the 1960’s, the cultural mores of the south and fleeting glimpses of the historical politics of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. This is a story of strong, brave women pitted against vain, racist, mean women. Discovering whether these women can secretly write and publish a book telling their sad, brave, outrageous stories and live to enjoy it, is well worth the effort and the reason this book has been on the best seller list for 51 weeks!