Ladder of Years: Anne Tyler

Men who leave their families is a common theme in books (and life) but in Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, it’s the wife who leaves. Delia Grinstead, housewife, married to Dr. Grinstead and mother of 3 simply walks away from the annual family holiday wearing only her beach clothes but (handily) carrying the family’s holiday money in her bag.

There’s some back story to this sudden departure. Delia’s father was a widowed doctor who hired young Dr Sam Grinstead as a partner. Delia remembers how she and her older sisters, Linda and Eliza sat on the couch as if on display for Sam and how they vied for his attention over dinner. Delia, at 17, didn’t think she ‘stood’ a chance,’ but Sam picked Delia to marry, according to one long time patient, as Linda was “too short and the middle one is too plump.”

Delia’s life, in many ways has been mapped out, but she still has the life many would envy. Sam is a responsible, if not overly attentive husband, and there are no economic hardships. Following her father’s death, Delia, Sam and their children still live in her father’s home (inherited in a 3-way split with her sisters) and she handles all the office work for Sam. One day at the supermarket, Adrian, a good-looking man, who spies his ex-wife shopping, asks Delia to pretend to be his girlfriend. From this moment, it’s as though Delia, a romance novel reader, sees her life through new eyes. Her husband takes her for granted, her teenage children are rude and alienated. She’s flattered by Adrian’s attention, and a budding relationship forms between Delia and her new acquaintance. The fact that Adrian makes his living from a quarterly newsletter focused on time travel doesn’t seem to sink in. When Sam finds out and confronts Delia, she walks out of the family holiday and out of her life.

Delia ends up in Bay Borough, a small town with very limited services and very limited employment opportunities. She takes a room at a boarding house owned by real estate agent Belle, and gets a job with the only lawyer in town. Over the 18 months, Delia makes several friends, Belle of course, who is always stalking the next married man, Vanessa, a single mother, Joel, the high school principal and his son Noah and Joel’s ex wife Ella.

I liked this book even though the characters are all impossibly nice even the grumpy ones. At one point a well-heeled 67 year old man, Nat (Noah’s grandfather) who lives in a retirement home marries Binky a 35 year old who works in the gift shop, and it’s presented as though Nat’s daughters are unreasonable shrews to be alarmed or to think that Binky is after Nat’s $$. C’mon.

Delia, who is suffering from grief at her father’s death, isn’t given to a great deal of inner speculation which seems odd as she is intelligent and thoughtful, but she does mull over her love of romance novels and Sam’s tepid courtship. Neither does she spend much time thinking about her children. But the lack of communication goes both ways. Again I found it odd. Delia has never been alone in her life, and now she is untethered with a few belongings that can fit in a cardboard box. She is remarkably self-contained for someone who has literally never been alone in her life, and for this reader she wasn’t a realistic character. Also Sam remains one dimensional. Delia’s sister Linda thinks that Sam “couldn’t wait” to get his hand on their father’s practice, but it’s a dying practice with Sam making housecalls for hypochondriacs in the middle of the night. There are plenty of hints that it hasn’t been easy for Sam; for example how Delia’s father, supposedly retired, would pick up the phone extension and chime in when patients called Sam in the middle of the night. For this reader, Sam was either unambitious or wanted to stick around for Delia’s sake.

There’s some great irony here–Sam and Joel are both old-maidish, boring men and Delia is either attracted to them or they are attracted to her. Delia and Joel’s ex, Ella have more in common than Delia cares to admit. There’s not much passion here; it’s all a bit quiet and tepid (apart from Belle who is the spiciest character). But that said, I enjoyed the book.

One of the best scenes takes place around a bleak Thanksgiving dinner at Belle’s house when her latest married man dumps her and goes back to his Mrs and their 6 week-old baby. Belle is initially inconsolable, but then she realises that there’s a married man sitting right at her table. It doesn’t matter that Donald is there with his wife. The flattery rolls out as Belle describes Donald as a “gorgeous man” an “important executive” and it only gets worse when Belle encourages Donald to talk about his college sports career:

Everyone was watching Belle. Open-mouthed and breathless, miraculously recovered, Belle stroked her topmost button with a hypnotic, circular motion and kept her damp-lashed eyes focused raptly on Donald’s lips.

I wondered how readers would feel if Sam was the bolter instead of his wife. Delia takes off without as much as a note, and there are very few exchanges with Sam or her children. If Sam left and did the same (without child support) would he have any reader sympathy? In a way the book is about starting over, new beginnings and how we tend to replicate patterns of behaviour. Delia and Nat are prime examples of that ‘go around the board and get it right this time’ thinking. I won’t give spoilers but the ending left many questions as … in a way… is history repeating itself? Ditching and moving on when there are complications and baggage.

Hard Girls: J Robert Lennon

At first appearances, 35-year-old Jane Pool is a person with a seemingly staid respectable life, but it’s a life that doesn’t fit–she’s married, has a daughter and has a close relationship with her father, Professor Pool. But scraping away these details, her marriage is in trouble, she’s an ex-con, her twin sister, Lila is incommunicado and her mother, Annabel disappeared 20 years earlier.

The story kicks off when Jane receives what appears to be a spam email, but Jane recognises it as a message from her sister. Years earlier Jane and Lila established a code using E. Nesbit’s book, The Railway Children. The sisters have not seen each other for over 10 years but now Lila has contacted Jane because she has a lead on Annabel’s whereabouts. Jane, already on probation as far as her husband and mother-in-law are concerned, packs lightly, knowing that she’s ditching her marriage and motherhood:

This was the thing they’d gone to therapy for, his patronizing, sexist fear that her distant past would rise and overwhelm her, leave her drugged and drunk in some alley, send her back to prison. The therapy hadn’t worked, because Chance hadn’t wanted to believe she could be trusted.

Following convoluted instructions, Jane finally meets her sister, and together they go searching for their mother. The story goes back and forth between the past and the present. While Jane and Lila follow their mother’s trail, Professor Pool removes his gun from this safe. …

It probably was not to my advantage as a reader that I read (and loved) Familiar, Happyland and Castle. (Ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd favs), and due to those reading experiences, I had certain content expectations–which to be honest is not fair at all to the author. Hard Girls is a crime novel which explores family loyalties, identity and the memories that form our histories. While Lila has taken the unconventional path, Jane has chosen safety, but those unanswered questions nag at the periphery of her existence. On another note, IMO Chance had a point about Jane being sucked back into her dark past. One minute she’s respectable and the next she’s nicking a car from a woman at an airport. Tsk Tsk.

Review copy.

Welcome Home, Stranger: Kate Christensen

In Kate Christensen’s novel, Welcome Home Stranger, a novel about confronting the past, mistakes and personal demons, Rachel, a self-described “middle-aged childless recently orphaned menopausal workaholic journalist” returns to Maine following the death of her mother. Rachel lives in DC (more of that later) while younger sister, Celeste stayed in Maine and married affluent Neil, whose family money has granted them a mansion in Portland. Neil and Celeste and have 2 children. Outwardly, Celeste and Neil have enviable lives:

“entrenched in their middle-class lives with teenage twins, Mallory and jasper and a pair of designer dogs I’ve only see in Celeste’s Instagram posts.”

Rachel and Celeste’s father was a “grifter junkie deadbeat” while their mother was “criminally neglectful [and] mentally ill.” In a grass-is-always-greener sort of way, to Rachel, Celeste seems to have it all: the home, the husband, the kids and the looks, but to Celeste, Rachel escaped and left her dealing with their mother, Lucie, a woman who “came at life with a cosmopolitan woman-of-the-world confidence, jaunty and arrogant.” To Rachel, difficult Lucie was a “kook” with a penchant for “flamboyant weirdness” while Rachel, on the other hand, tries to “cultivate camouflaging drabness.” So given that Rachel seems “free,” at least to Celeste, who has shouldered the burden of her mother’s care, there are undercurrents between the two sisters. Perhaps those undercurrents explain WHY Celeste invites Big Loser, David Mansfield and his new wife, Molly, to dinner on Rachel’s first night back in Portland. David was Rachel’s “addiction” and they have had an on and off again sexual relationship for over 25 years.

This is of course when things begin to get messy. Good thing Lucie left her Portland townhouse to Rachel.

Now some backstory to Rachel: Rachel still lives with Wallace, her former husband in DC. They split but he moved back in, with his boyfriend, when Wallace was diagnosed with ALS. So while Celeste thinks that Rachel has a great life, Rachel has her own share of troubles. To Rachel, inheriting the townhouse is a ticket out of her problems, but the place needs work before it can be out on the market. I liked Welcome Home, Stranger, but was more than a bit frustrated by many of Rachel’s choices–especially since they are so obviously headed to … well… read the book. Not that foolish actions makes for a dull read–how frequently the opposite is true, but in this case, some of the choices (self-destructive choices) are depressing.

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Breathing Lessons: Anne Tyler

Many years ago, I overheard a married couple bickering in a supermarket. I’m sure they bickered at home too. I’m sure they bickered all the time. It was a habit with them which explains the ease with which they chewed away at each other in public. And that brings me to Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, a book which follows a long-term married couple for one day as they attend a funeral, reunite with a long-lost granddaughter and confront some painful truths about their lives.

Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for 28 years. In high school, they both had plans which never bore fruit. Ira, whose petty, selfish father, owned a framing shop, planned to head off to college and become a doctor. Maggie had a boyfriend who was away in college. A weird twist brought Ira and Maggie together and here they are 28 years later. Ira now runs the framing shop and supports his father and 2 sisters. Ira’s extended family still live above the shop while Ira and Maggie have a modest, slightly run-down home. Maggie’s dreams were also packed away when she married and she works in a care home. They have two children: Jesse and Daisy. The siblings are polar opposites: prim, studious, emotionally detached Daisy is heading to college while Jesse who is (still) in a band is a divorced, underemployed, lackadaisical father.

Ira, who whistles his thoughts, is laconic:

There were times when Ira didn’t say a dozen words all day, and even when he did talk. you couldn’t guess what he was feeling. He was a closed-in, isolated man.

Maggie is a meddler. She can’t accept her son’s divorce from Fiona and she really can’t accept that her only grandchild, who briefly lived with Jesse and Fiona in the Moran family home, lives miles away. Maggie is convinced that Fiona and Jesse are still in love. The Morans are due to attend the funeral of the husband of one of Maggie’s dearest friends, Serena, and Maggie decides that they should ‘swing by’ to see Fiona after the funeral.

It’s obvious that Tyler has great affection for her characters, but there were times I wanted to gag Maggie. The trip begins with a reckless car accident which Ira, a man who has checked out for life for many reasons, manages to take, more or less, in stride. Maggie never quits which, at times, can be admirable, but there are other times, many times in this novel, when Maggie should just move on. Yet at the same time, there is a sort of magic to Maggie–the way she draws people out; the easy way she has conversations with strangers. There’s one scene–the funniest scene in the book IMO–in which Maggie strikes up a conversation with a waitress at a roadside cafe. Maggie, misreading the waitress as a like-minded soul instead of an overworked practiced sympathetic ear, openly bitches about Ira.

Most of the book is a detailed look at this long-term, complex marriage as Ira and Maggie go on a road trip. Tyler’s magnifying glass examines how Ira and Maggie, a very ordinary couple, approach various issues in life from directions to honesty about Jesse’s failings. There’s a bitterness here under the surface of events that Tyler skates over lightly–for example the way in which Ira sets Maggie up for a huge fail.

I liked the book, and the astute examination of long-term marriage, but ultimately it’s a bit too gooey for my tastes. After a day together in the car like this, it’s hard for me to accept that Ira and Maggie wouldn’t come to blows. But then again, perhaps they both settle for passive-aggressive revenge. It’s easy to see how Ira became more and more laconic as he left his youthful dreams behind and recognised the reality of the burden he must shoulder. And it was equally easy to imagine Maggie becoming perkier and perkier as she filled in the gaps in their married life. An adapt or divorce strategy.

She grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We’re all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

Tom Lake: Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake doesn’t refer to a person, but to a place. It’s a town in Michigan in which during the 1980s, a “renowned summer stock theatre” troupe rehearsed Our Town (Thornton Wilder). One of the cast members is Lara, a young girl who has extremely good fortune in her acting career. A New Hampshire native, she lands the role of Emily while still in high school. Later, in college, although she never really seriously considered acting as a career, she plays the role again and is picked up by a visiting director and sent to Hollywood. But the film project stalls and Lara travels to Michigan to play Emily once again.

But this is a story about luck, at least in the early years, and so my luck continued to hold

At Tom Lake, Lara, who seems destined to forever play the role of Emily (except for the advent of time), falls in love with the charismatic actor Peter Duke, who plays Emily’s father. It’s a summer of love until Lara ruptures her Achilles tendon, and her understudy takes over the part. Lara returns home and marries Joe Nelson, a steady, reliable cherry farmer. They have 3 daughters.

When the novel opens it’s 2020, during the Pandemic and Lara, now 57, shelters all three of her 20-something-year-old daughters: Emily, Maisie and Nell. The story goes back and forth in time as it explores Lara’s past and present–along with Emily’s former obsession that Duke is her father. (and to be fair, it is a bit weird that she’s named Emily. …)

The pandemic umbrella is a thin setting for the novel even though it explains why all three adult daughters are home. Some of the comments on this blog address the problems of The Pandemic Novel (thanks, Lisa), and I think Tom Lake falls into that category. The idea of just how a person deals with a brief moment of fame was interesting, but this is a slow read–no excitement which is not a big deal, but I found myself really not that interested in these people–although I was interested in the business of growing cherries. Patchett is a tremendously popular author, and my reaction to the book seems to be a minority opinion.

Review copy

Blue Skies: T. C. Boyle

Set in the not-too-distant future, T.C. Boyle’s novel, Blue Skies, follows an affluent California family of 4 as the planet continues on its course towards the effects of global warming. Three members of the family live in Santa Barbara; father Frank is a doctor, mother, Ottilie, responding to her son, Cooper’s beliefs about the destructive nature of the cattle industry exhausting precious resources, proudly buys a cricket farm to generate an alternate protein source. Cooper, an entomologist, is dating fellow entomologist Mari, who specialises in ticks. One day they collect ticks together which leads to an incident which has a tragic, life-altering outcome for Cooper.

Daughter, Cat, lives in Florida with her boyfriend, later husband, Bacardi ambassador, Todd. Cat and Todd moved to Florida when he inherited his now-deceased mother’s beach home, and with a sizeable chunk of his mother’s life insurance, he bought himself a Red Tesla Model X. Todd, one of those single-minded, unflappable men, whose life is a succession of compartments, travels a lot which means that Cat is left home alone frequently. Cat doesn’t get it yet, but she occupies a very small space in Todd’s life. He says he doesn’t want kids (“are you joking or what?”) or a dog or a cat (“he was allergic: hair, dander, fleas”) and one day while Cat waits for “perfectionist” Todd, who is busy supervising the detailing of his beloved Tesla, she looks at the window of Herps, a reptile shop, and spies a beautiful snake for sale. Cat, a would-be Instagram influencer, covets the snake ands sees it as “living jewelry.” Imagining the best colours she could wear to enhance the colour of the snake, she decides a snake is something she can hang around her neck as her signature trademark–a “statement.”

Talk about impulse buying–the minute she walked through the door and saw them glittering there in their plexiglass cases, she knew she had to have one.

The snake is a Burmese Python, and Cat, who doesn’t know the first thing about snakes let alone Burmese Pythons, happily takes him, “Willie,” home. Cat, left alone far too much, is already developing a drinking problem, and she stops at a bar on the way home and makes quasi-friends with the owner.

The novel follows the lives of Cat, Cooper and Ottilie (dad is very much in the background). In California, Ottlie and Cooper deal with soaring temps and food prices, water scarcity, and wildfires. Meanwhile on the other side of the country, Cat, is living in a beach house which is often inaccessible by car. The rain seems never ending, and then there are alligators and hurricanes.

The water was up to her shins by the time she turned into the peninsula road and she widened her stance, the way you do when you’re meeting resistance. But it was nothing really, and she’d seen higher tides before though this one seemed to be coming up still which was worrisome. Was there a limit? What if it rose ten feet? Twenty? What if it was like those CGI waves that stood on end in the disaster movies?

She passed the familiar houses which remained darkened except for the sentry lights, wondering whether anybody was at home even as the term ‘evacuation’ came into her head. A term she immediately dismissed because this wasn’t so bad. It was nothing, but then she was thinking how mild the hurricane season had been and what it would be like in a real blow and how they would manage to evacuate if it came to that. In a rowboat? They didn’t have a rowboat. She made a note to herself: they should get one, or no a speedboat which they could take out on the bay in muggy weather and at least generate a breeze and wouldn’t that be nice? Not to mention practical in case worst came to worst.

She was a long block away from the house when her eyes picked out something moving in the road, a log rolling on the tide, wasn’t it? She drew closer. It moved again. Not in the direction of the flow but against it. And what was that all about? The night was still. Not a breeze even. The only sounds, the trickle of the water and the incessant complaint of the insects. Curious, she pulled out her phone and shone the light on it so that all at once it fabricated itself out of spare parts and she saw what is was. An alligator. She was drunk, or at least drunk enough that everything seemed enchanting, the night, the water, Florida, but the sight of it gave her a start. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid, just that this thing, this reptile didn’t belong there, in the middle of her street at what … she snatched a look at the time … 12:30 in the morning. It was wrong. That was what it was. Like something out of a nature film on PBS transposed to her reality.

While people like Ottilie, are “doing their bit” using their guilt as currency in their everyday lives, there are people like Todd who sail on with tunnel vision. Blue Skies tackles a lot of serious issues: climate change, social media, parenting, the exotic animal trade (legal and illegal), and T.C. Boyle juggles them all perfectly. We see Cat and Cooper–Cat, consumed with social media to the point that her present is secondary to ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ is about to get a horrific awakening, while Cooper, increasingly depressed about his lack of achievement and the future of the planet, engages in some self-destructive behaviour. Even though Blue Skies is a serious novel, exploring some serious social issues, the characters are never secondary to the issues. Interestingly Boyle sets the stage for the characters to struggle against the elements, nature, and even themselves but there is always compassion.

This was an amazing read, and I was sorry to get to the end of the book. Blue Skies easily makes my best of year list. I listened to the audio book version which was beautifully read by Alyssa Bresnaman

Review copy

The Road to Dalton: Shannon Bowling

Set in a small town in Northern Maine, Shannon Bowling’s novel, The Road to Dalton explores the lives of a handful of residents whose lives connect through love, loss, grief, disappointment, and violence. It’s 1990 and middle-aged, childless Trudy Haskell, the director of the town library, is in love with Bev Theroux, who works at a care home. Trudy is married to the town Dr., Richard Haskell, while Bev is married to Bill. Richard is aware of the relationship; it’s a “strained agreement,” but Richard has accepted it. As a result, the Haskell’s marriage is sterile and lifeless. Bev’s marriage isn’t any better. Bill was a serial cheater for years, but now he’s mostly parked:

The irritation of seeing Bill sprawled out in his chair starts to ebb from her veins. He’s been such a wallower ever since he had to go on disability for his back a few years ago. To hell with it. Let him sit there, let him wallow.

To everyone else in Dalton, Trudy and Bev are just friends, best friends. Bev’s son, Nate, the local cop, who is oblivious to his mother’s secret love, is married to Bridget, the daughter of the wealthy Fraziers, the owners of the local mill. Bridget has just had a baby and seems unable to cope, and Nate fills the ever-increasing gaps as well as he can.

To Bev and Trudy, the best part of their lives, the time when they can really be themselves is when they are together, but for Dr Haskell, it’s when he’s treating patients. In this tight-knit town with very few outsiders, Dr Haskell knows all the residents, and has known them all their lives. He treats a young woman named Rose, whose abusive partner, Tommy, is a well-known, and much disliked troublemaker.

While some of the characters are connected by marriage, there are others who are connected simply by location. Bev, who manages the care home, knows crotchety Nora, whose son, Roger, in his 40s marries and returns to Dalton with Alice, a much younger wife who hails from Southern Maine. While Nora expresses concern that her son was going to remain “one of those bachelor types,” she isn’t thrilled at all with Roger’s choice. And that situation becomes worse when Nora moves in with the newlyweds and rejects all of Alice’s efforts to please her.

Those who like the works of Elizabeth Strout should enjoy The Road to Dalton. The comparison is both good and bad for this debut author. The setting is Maine and the book unfolds through chapters that reveal the lives of these interconnected characters, but there is no Olive here. The stories which reflect the lives of everyday people with their everyday disappointments is realistic in its depiction of struggle, acceptance, sacrifice and compromise.

Richard felt a strange sensation, one he experienced again years later with Trudy, when he would begin to suspect their marriage would never become the strong union he’d hoped for. A feeling of something not quite right, like a shoe that fits just a little too small. Mildly irritating and distracting–but not enough to make Richard change the entire trajectory of his life.

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Stella Dallas: Olive Prouty (1923)

Olive Prouty’s novel, Stella Dallas, is the tale of a social climbing woman, driven by her desire for a better life, who marries out of her class. But while Stella may attain what she sees as social position, she remains an outsider in a judgmental society.

Stella is the daughter of a Millhampton mill labourer. Anticipating a drab future, she sets her sights on white-collar mill employee, Stephen Dallas. The Dallases were an eminently respectable Illinois family, until Stephen’s father, a lawyer, committed suicide. After his death, it was discovered that, as a trustee and advisor, he had embezzled funds from various estates and charities. With a deep sense of shame, Stephen repaid the stolen (“borrowed”) funds from the family coffers, left the girl he loved, Helen Dane, and prepared for a modest life far from the public eye.

So here’s Stephen, freshly wounded from scandal, far from home and family, working at a mill. Stephen stands out as “different” compared to the other mill employees, and Stella recognises that difference. She learns he attended the same college as other Millhampton “blue-bloods who lived on the other side of the river.” Stella is “aware that this Mr. Dallas was the biggest opportunity she had ever had.”

Stella, who is considered locally to be a cut above the other mill town girls, has rather craftily created the most flattering setting for herself by creating a beautiful summerhouse trailing with vines. It’s here Stephen, who is leading a drab depressing life, courts Stella, and they marry 4 months after they meet.

At first, everything goes well with Stephen sure he can “make her over, rub down the rough edges,” but soon “grave doubts and misgivings assailed” him. Stella is a “clever mimic” and at first she manages to hold her own at various Millhampton gatherings, but very soon she oversteps the boundaries of a polite society she doesn’t understand. Stella equates money with class; she doesn’t understand the difference. Stephen tries to remonstrate with Stella about her behaviour–in particular, behaviour with other men, but Stella insists she wants fun. The birth of their daughter, Laurel, does not turn Stella into the manageable matron Stephen hopes for. Instead Laurel is mostly ignored while Stella throws herself back into a social whirl and becomes much too friendly with Alfred Munn, the life-of-any-party, a horse riding instructor.

When the book opens, Stephen and Stella are leading separate lives. He lives in New York and sees Laurel, now 13 years-old, a few times a year. Stella receives $350 a month and Stella and Laurel live in the “cheapest rooms” in hotels and are subject to casual snubs from guests and staff alike. Laurel thinks her mother is beautiful but we are told she is a “fat, shapeless little ball of a woman” who takes hours to dress, dyes her hair and lathers on the makeup.

Laurel is just beginning to interpret the contrast between her father’s genteel world and her mother’s. She also notes the barbed, seemingly friendly comments made by other residents at the hotels. Then Stella makes the disastrous decision to take Laurel out into society …

Stella Dallas is a character study of a woman who is driven by ambition to marry out of her class only to face a painful decision regarding her daughter’s future. The film version with Barbara Stanwyck is a tear-jerker. Stella in the film is portrayed more favourably while Stephen comes across as a stiff, empty suit. In both the book and the film, Stephen’s idea of fatherhood leaves a lot of be desired while the book version of Alfred Munn’s behaviour sounds predatory alarm bells when it comes to Laurel. The book version of Stella offers a far more complex character–a woman not much interested in being a wife, not much interested in being a mother–a woman who wants to define her own life with her own standards of right and wrong. Stella at first attempts to do this within the prism of her husband’s ‘authority,’ and so fails. It’s only through complete independence that Stella finds some of peace.

The ultimate sacrifice Stella makes may seem like a traditional happy ending but the outcome of that sacrifice is off in the distant future and cannot easily be predicted. Personally I wouldn’t want to cozy up with this snooty crowd.

I loved Stella’s ability to ‘stage’ a scene. I rather enjoyed this book and rewatched the film too.

The Guest: Emma Cline

In Emma Cline’s novel, The Guest, it’s August, and Alex, a young sex worker, is spending the summer in the Hamptons as a guest of a wealthy man in his 50s, Simon. Alex met Simon in a New York bar just as she hit rock bottom. She was behind on her rent, and her roommates want to throw her out. Business hasn’t been great lately, and Alex has “dropped her rates, then dropped them again.” She’s “no longer welcome in ” various hotel bars and restaurants for charging items to former client accounts, and “too many of her usuals” stopped calling. With business down, Alex became “lax with her usual screening policies,” and was “ripped off more than once.” Spiraling downwards with increasing desperation, she reconnects with a client named Dom, a volatile violent man. Alex, who steals whenever an opportunity presents itself, steals from Dom.

So Alex, at rock bottom, thinks Simon “swooped in to save the day.” When they meet at a bar, with her very practiced act, she imagines he thinks she’s just a “normal” girl,” and that he buys her coy, shy girl act, so when Simon invites Alex to his splendid home in the Hamptons for the month of August, she can’t believe her luck. At first everything goes well. She spends days at the beach swimming, and she attends various social events with Simon. He buys her many expensive designer gifts, and is Simon’s Barbie doll. Giving blow jobs on demand and “offer[ing] up no friction whatsoever.”

And wasn’t it better to give people what they wanted? A conversation performed as a smooth transaction–a silky back-and-forth without the interruption of reality. Most everyone preferred the story. Alex learned how to provide it, how to draw people in with a vision of themselves, unrecognizable but turned up ten degrees, amplified into something better. […] Alex had imagined what kind of person Simon would like, and that was the person Alex told him she was.

So here is Alex spending her days lounging on the beach and at Simon’s home, she lives in luxury, waited upon by his employees, and the most incredible meals are prepared for her. While it is, no doubt, not easy being someone’s sex toy who apparently has no desires, opinions or tastes of her own, this is Alex’s profession. So here’s a luxury holiday (with strings) handed to her on a plate, but there’s some little part of her character that cannot sustain the role. Perhaps it’s the boredom. Perhaps it’s a self-destructive streak.

When she horribly embarrasses Simon at a party, Alex finds herself rapidly kicked out of Paradise. With very little money, a dying cell phone, an angry Dom looking for her, and no place to stay, Alex grifts her way through the Hamptons, hoping to make it to Labour Day when she can crash Simon’s party, confident he will forgive her.

Alex is a credible creation. Self destructive, she trashes relationships and then thinks people will be charmed into one more favour–they’re not. She never gets over the idea that she’s special. Simon, I suspect, knows from the onset that Alex is a sex worker. She may think she’s giving him an ingenue story that he’s naive enough to believe, but perhaps Simon’s seeming acceptance of the story allows him to circumvent that grubby discussion of money. It’s highly likely that Simon has a string of girls just like Alex. They are easily replaceable.

As Alex desperately grifts her way through the Hamptons, lying and charming her way through favours, she meets a range of characters including Nicholas, an assistant/caretaker who spends an evening with Alex, much to his regret, a child who is Alex’s ticket into an exclusive members-only club (free food and drinks) and a young man with mental health issues. As the days pass in the Hamptons, we see the underbelly of this ultra-wealthy area–the gigolo husband whose boredom can’t compensate for a plush life, employees who act like automatons until their employers aren’t looking, wealthy residents who employ security to clear away trespassing vacationers like bits of trash, and holidaymakers who have their own version of the Hampton’s experience.

We see the vast gap between the Haves and the Have-nots, the Shangri-La estates of the ultra-rich which create a sort of unreality for those who long to be included, and the alienation of Alex, who longs to belong once more. There’s a totem pole here–Alex at first has a good position, albeit temporary, but as she slides down that pole, the ‘respect’ employees used towards her slips. Alex is a user, but she is also used. Basically homeless, and carrying around one bag of increasingly stained and creased designer clothing, it becomes harder and harder to keep up the charade that she belongs with the ultra-rich set.

Harrowing in its clear-eyed view of Alex’s descent and her own inability to recognize that she has little to parlay, this incredible book makes my Best-Of-Year list.

Alex could just go up to one of the men. Approach a table with only a few men hunched over their watery cocktails, a manageable audience. Easy enough. You waved your fingers, you spoke in a voice just a tick too quiet–they got flustered, trying to follow what was happening. Any glitch in the usual order of things, the expected social script, made people anxious, off balance. Even a glancing touch at their elbow, the barest squeeze of an arm, could short-circuit any wariness. Suddenly they were newly suggestible, eager to find steady footing in whatever story you offered.

And men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman–not usually anyway. They did not immediately assume that her motives might be murky, their vanity allowing for the possibility that she had been drawn over by the sheer force of their personhood. But not really sensible to try that here. The air was too domestic, dripping with the proximity of family and other blunt moral concerns. It had a chilling effect; the wives nearby, the children.

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You Are Here: Karin-Lin Greenberg

Karin-Lin Greenberg’s novel You Are Here centres on the impact of the closing of an upstate New York shopping mall on a handful of characters. Sunshine Clips is down to one station and the only hairstylist left standing is single mother Tina Huang whose only son, 9 year old Jackson hangs out in the mall after school. There’s red-headed bookshop manager Kevin ABD who now knows he will never finish his PhD or teach, and honestly to Kevin, not teaching is not a loss. At all. Kevin’s wife, Gwen, a poet and adjunct lecturer doesn’t know that Kevin has no desire to teach. She’s busy working on compiling poetry for a book.

Kevin, Gwen and their 6-year-old twins have moved back in with Gwen’s widowed mother in order to economize. Wait.. that’s not quite correct. Kevin built a 300 sq ft tiny house and it is parked in his mother-in-law, Joan’s back garden. Next to Joan lives 90 year-old widow, Ro. Ro and Joan have been neighbours for over 40 years but have never stepped inside each other’s homes.

When Joan and her now-deceased husband Earl Walker moved in their house in the mid 70s they were the first Black family in the neighbourhood. Ro’s husband Lawrence (also now deceased) wanted to make friends and be neighbourly but Ro wasn’t having that. Today she thinks that “forty years ago she wouldn’t have invited a black woman into her home, but today she would,” The problem is that having marginalized the Walkers for over 40 years, she can’t now shift from brief hellos to her neighbours to any sort of friendship.

And nowadays, she certainly isn’t a racist. Just look at all the people Ro has in her life. The woman who cuts her hair is Chinese, Jose who mows her lawn every Wednesday is Mexican, the neighbours down the street are from Pakistan, and the neighbours in the other direction at the end of the street are from Iran. At the block party in August, Ro even ate the biryani the Agarwals made and the fesenjan cooked by the Farzans, and if she’s being honest, she liked both of those dishes. A young lesbian couple, Dawn and Amy, live four doors down from Ro, and they have a rainbow flag flapping from their front porch. Ro smiles and says hello when they pass by while she’s working in her garden, even though they put their three-legged pug in a stroller and roll the dog around in the neighbourhood, which she doesn’t approve of.

Ro is inflexible and is on the nosy side, but she lives alone and the extent of her social life is her weekly hair appointment. She can’t help but notice the tiny home in her neighbour’s garden. Since the construction of the tiny house, she has become addicted to the programme, Tiny House Hunters:

These tiny homes–they are appalling. Tiny House Hunters only confirms this. Tonight’s episode features a woman who sold her colonial in Greensboro, North Carolina, after she got a divorce and her son went off to college. Ro takes a sip of her Sleepytime tea and watches as this woman divests herself of everything except what can fit in the trunk of her Subaru Outback. This woman has to climb a ladder in her tiny house to reach a loft for sleeping. She owns one bowl, one mug, one pan for cooking, one spoon, and one fork. What will she do when her son comes to visit? Will she tell him to steal silverware from the dining hall to bring home?

“It’s so freeing,” says the woman.” It makes you realize how much things own you.”

Ro snorts. Soon, this woman is going to miss her spatulas and colander and couch cushions.

You Are Here is a warm-hearted novel that asks whether people can change thanks to relationships with others. Ro is 90 and has opinions and attitudes from the 70s that clash with the current reality. She isn’t a ‘bad’ person by any means, but due to her attitudes, she has problems connecting with others. Kevin, in particular, has a very hard time accepting Ro, and consequently, his lack of understanding of Ro is unkind and narrow minded (things he accuses Ro of being). Many of the characters are dreamers–dreaming of a future or a better life than the ones they find themselves stuck in. Kevin, for example, who goes above and beyond at the bookshop, has various business schemes that go wrong. Tina dreams of being an artist while her son yearns to be a magician. You Are Here is sweeter than my normal read, but I enjoyed it for the exploration of character and how the author created a lonely universe for each character.

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