I had no particular reason to read this Henry James novella other than an overnight visit to Rye - the ancient Sussex town in which James resided in LI had no particular reason to read this Henry James novella other than an overnight visit to Rye - the ancient Sussex town in which James resided in Lamb’s House from 1897 to 1916. The Rye bookshop had an edition of two of his well-known novellas: this, and The Turn of the Screw.
It’s been a while since I’ve read any of James’s work and the world’s manners have changed so much that I did wonder if there is still any point to a story about a girl’s reputation in ‘good’ society. Daisy Miller - young, pretty, American, rich - is visiting Europe in the company of her mother and younger brother. At the Swiss lakeside resort of Vevey, she meets an American expatriate (more European than American) called Winterbourne. The young man is immediately struck by her prettiness and open nature, but even as he is attracted to her, he is confused by her seeming disregard for certain rules and conventions. Is she an innocent flirt or a dangerous one?
He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced.
Daisy’s reckless behaviour - chiefly exhibited by circulating throughout Rome, unchaperoned, with an Italian man called Mr Giovanelli to whom she is not engaged - confounds Winterbourne. He spends most of this brief story trying to figuring her out; and since the story is told from his point of view, so does the reader. Is she, in the end, just trying to make him jealous? Or is she lonely, and accepting companionship where it is offered? We never quite know or understand Daisy Miller, and although Henry James brings the story to a dramatic conclusion he doesn’t go as far as to answer that question. ...more
In a better world, Paul would've snagged a line drive bare-handed off the bat of one of the ersatz A's, gone trooping off to the Hall of Fame with
In a better world, Paul would've snagged a line drive bare-handed off the bat of one of the ersatz A's, gone trooping off to the Hall of Fame with a proud, satisfyingly swollen mitt, had a satisfactory but not overly good time nosing around through Babe Ruth's locker, taking in the Johnny Bench 'out at second' video and hearing canned crowd noises from the Thirties. Later we could've walked out into the shimmery sunshine of Sunday, caught-ball in hand, gone for a Gay Nineties malt, found some aspirin, had our caricatures drawn together wearing vintage baseball suits, had some well-earned laughs, played Frisbee, set off my bottle rockets along a deserted inlet of the lake and ended the day early, lying in the grass under a surviving elm, with me explaining the ultimate value of good manners and that a common sense commitment to progress (while only a Christian fiction) can still be a good, pragmatic overlay onto a life that could get dicey and long.
There is a very specific rhythm to the narrative of this book and it requires full immersion for full appreciation. It's a book that devotes itself to the relentless inner dialogue of Frank Banscombe: divorced father of two, sportswriter turned realtor. I'm not sure where the book is meant to take us - is it just a coincidence that Frank spends so much time bogged down in traffic, or keeps having to reroute his journeys? There is something undeniably compelling about the narrative, though, and I definitely felt like the voice of Frank lodged itself inside my head.
Throughout the book, Frank makes reference to the fact that he is living in his 'Existence' period. I inferred that to mean that Frank feels some degree of emotional detachment - not just from his life, but from the relationships in his life. I'm not sure if that's just a lie that Frank tells himself, though. After 451 pages of being directly exposed to Frank's mental processes, so alive to detail and nuance of personality, so prone to sharing ten details when one or two would do, I'm not sure I would describe him as detached. Instead, he seems absolutely awash in awareness - not to mention analysis.
Frank lives in Haddam, New Jersey, in his former wife's house, and he is the owner of two other small rental houses and a root-beer stand. In the course of the book, he will attempt to find the right property for a difficult couple called the Markhams. Details about houses - the way they are constructed, the styles of them, the market value of them - are a constant theme in the book, although the emotional significance of them is not lost on Frank, either. His ex-wife's new husband is an architect: psychoanalyse that, if you will. In fact, I never was sure how much of this book was meant to be read symbolically or metaphorically. It feels dense with meaning at times, and not just because of its penchant for elaborately detailed sentences.
There are three women in Frank's life and all of the relationships are unresolved in some way. The first relationship is with Ann, his former wife; although they have been divorced for a number of years, it's clear that Frank is still attached to her in a variety of ways, and not just because of the children (two living and one dead) which they share. Then there is his girlfriend Sally, who he is considering committing to on some level. Finally, there is his former girlfriend and fellow co-worker Clair Devane - whose unsolved murder is a mystery both in the town of Haddam and in this book.
What does it all mean or add up to? I was never entirely sure. At times, I was beguiled by the writing and at other times I was maddened by it. Is it meant to be just a 3 day 'slice' in the life of a middle-aged, middle-class American man? Is Frank's life meant to be read as a parallel story of the United States, as the title implies? Is this story an identity crisis or an endurance test? A comedy or a tragedy?
Suffice it to say, Frank Banscombe's visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame with his teenage son Paul - meant to be an opportunity for father-son bonding, and a wholesomely American one at that - does not play out in quite the 'ideal' way imagined in the paragraph I quote from. (By the way, that quotation should give you a good sense of the writing style.) Instead, the two end up in the hospital because Paul has deliberately put himself in the direct trajectory of a ball machine - although it is probable that, although he had the intention to hurt himself (or at least his father), he was still surprised by the result.
That might seem like an apt metaphor for Frank Banscombe's life, although his loquacious first-person narrative doesn't explicitly say so. Ford lays out Frank's life for us as a richly textured glorious mess of tapestry, and then he lets the reader judge for him or herself.
3.75 stars For at least half the time, I struggled to read this book. And yet, after finishing it, I found myself wanting to read its prequel The Sportswriter. Go figure ...more
No pesky mess of grasshoppers can beat us! We’ll do something! You’ll see! We’ll get along somehow.
This was the most iconic and memorable ‘Little
No pesky mess of grasshoppers can beat us! We’ll do something! You’ll see! We’ll get along somehow.
This was the most iconic and memorable ‘Little House’ book of my childhood. Perhaps that has something to do with the overlap with the popular 1970s/80s television series. In this book, the Ingalls family settles in Walnut Grove, Minnesota and for the first time Laura and Mary go to school and church. (There is a lot of emphasis on hair ribbons.) The spoiled little madam Nellie Olsen - whose father is a shopkeeper - becomes Laura’s nemesis in this book, and she provides an interesting foil for both Laura’s personality and the dawning understanding that Laura is a ‘country girl’, not to mention poor.
For the first time, there is a real contrast between farm life and town life - exemplified in the wonderfully detailed scene of Nellie’s party, and then the return hospitality of Laura’s party. Although the Ingalls family is aspirational, and has high standards, there is a real worry about money and the scarcity of necessities (especially shoes) in this book. There is the familiar ritual of house building - Pa converts their sod house into a proper house with ‘boughten’ wood and a stove - but even a child will feel the anxiety about how the family borrows against the future. The persistence of farmer debt - in other words, the tendency to borrow against a crop before it comes to fruition - becomes a theme in this book that will carry on throughout the rest of the series.
Although family life is still pre-eminent, particularly during the second half of the book which is marked by one disaster after another, there is far more ‘settlement’ and much less wild life and adventure than in the first two books. Indeed, the main source of ‘wild life’ are the horrible grasshoppers which ruin Charles Ingalls’ crops two years in a row. Those relentless grasshoppers, who strip the land of everything edible, are terrifying; far more frightening than the bear and panther of the earlier books.
Laura has a fierce pride and a hot temper and both come into play more and more in this book. She is also courageous, and that quality is also necessary as natural disasters come thick and fast. At the beginning of the book, Laura often gets into trouble of her own making; but in the second half of the book, her courage helps avert disaster. Charles Ingalls, ‘Pa’, is often missing in this novel and the loss of his strong presence is keenly felt by Laura. She often has to step into this gap and help out her mother.
Rereading this book was a vivid experience, partly because I had such a sense of dread about what is coming for the Ingalls family. In addition to old dangers like prairie fire, there are new ones - chiefly the grasshoppers, but also blizzards. Although many possible disasters are avoided, and the bonds of the family unit stay strong, there is way too much drama (some of it uncomfortably close) to make this a ‘cosy’ read. ...more
The wind sang a low, rustling song in the grass. Grasshoppers’ rasping quivered up from the immense prairie. A buzzing came faintly from all the tr
The wind sang a low, rustling song in the grass. Grasshoppers’ rasping quivered up from the immense prairie. A buzzing came faintly from all the trees in the creek bottoms. But all these sounds made a great, warm, happy silence. Laura had never seen a place she liked so much as this place.
The opening chapter to this children’s classic is titled ‘Going West’ and it chronicles the family’s journey, by covered wagon, all the way from Wisconsin to the ‘Indian country’ (modern Kansas and Oklahoma). The explanation for why the family is taking its chances in the unsettled West is that ‘there were too many people in the Big Woods now’. It’s such an American story: Manifest Destiny and fresh starts all rolled into one.
The book is narrated from the third-person point of view of Laura Ingalls, who is roughly 6 years old at the beginning of the family’s journey. Like her father - Charles Ingalls, or ‘Pa’ - Laura is totally game for this journey and truly alive to the beauty of the prairie landscape. As an adult reader, I was particularly attuned to the rapturous descriptions of the prairie - so sweet and clean and unspoiled. It is definitely portrayed as an Eden, with plenty of wild animals and space for everyone.
Some of the main themes of the series really start to emerge in the book - for instance, the family’s self-sufficiency. Although there are a few examples of neighbours helping out, Ma and Pa are depicted as being fully capable of taking care of their own little family. This is a book about ‘building’, too - and full of what Caroline Fraser, the author of Prairie Fires, calls the description of ‘process’. In this book, the narrator describes the following: how to build a house (walls, fireplace, roof, floor), make a bed, dig a well and shape a willow chair.
Pa and Laura love the wildness of this new land, while older sister Mary (always portrayed as a ‘good, obedient girl’ in comparison to naughtier, more curious Laura) and mother Caroline represent civilisation. Caroline, ‘Ma’, always insists on good manners and cleanliness, and is herself consistently portrayed as gentle, patient and kind. Ma’s ‘little china woman’ is itself a symbol of civilisation and is placed on a carved wooden shelf when the house is finally completed.
In the later books, most of the conflicts come from the challenges (natural and economic) of trying to make a living through farming. In this book, the central problem is that the land - which had seemed available to any settlers willing to ‘tame’ it - is already occupied by ‘Indians’ (named as the Osage tribe in the book). I couldn’t help but notice that the family’s split personality also divides on the subject of native Americans. Ma fears and resents them, while Pa and Laura are interested in them - even fascinated - and far more respectful of both their ways and their rights to the land. The book ends with the family’s retreat and a reverse journey back north, this time to Minnesota instead of Wisconsin.
In Caroline Fraser’s biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires, she notes that Charles Ingalls ‘never seemed to realize that his ambition for a profitable farm was irreconcilable with a love of untrammelled and unpopulated wilderness’. More than any of the other books, this one celebrates that wilderness . . . even as the family dedicate themselves to an attempt to civilise it. ...more
It’s very unusual for me to take three months to read a book, but I found this one - episodic in nature anyway - very easy to pick up but als3.5 stars
It’s very unusual for me to take three months to read a book, but I found this one - episodic in nature anyway - very easy to pick up but also to put down.
The author Nancy McCabe is a writer and an academic, and she does occasionally venture into that sort of territory (in terms of language or references to academic scholarship) while examining her ‘subject’. However, the larger half of the book would be more accurately described as memoir - and her intersection with her material is primarily from the vantage point of being a daughter, niece, cousin and mother.
The subtitle of this academic study/memoir is ‘Revisiting a Literary Childhood’ and McCabe’s starting point is her family’s devotion to the ‘Little House’ books penned (maybe?) by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like many readers, McCabe, her mother, aunts and female cousin Jody all felt that they had a special kinship with this beloved author and her books. They felt a sense of ‘ownership’ - and this is a key point which McCabe examines from a variety of angles. The books became part of their own lives and their own family mythology - culminating in a trip, undertaken when McCabe was a young teen and her aunt was dying of lupus, to visit some of the houses that the Ingalls and Wilder families had lived in. Much later, McCabe revisits these literary houses with her own daughter Sophie - and this time, she really makes a project of it. The Ingalls Wilder homes are visited, but other literary locations, too: Prince Edward Island (Lucy Maud Montgomery) and Mankato, Minnesota (Maud Hart Lovelace) and Concord, Massachusetts (Louisa May Alcott, Thoreau and Emerson).
There were several different strands to this book: first of all, McCabe delves into the roles that books (characters, authors) can play in our lives. Her own reading experiences are her main case study. Secondly, although this is what gives the book its structure, or at least its momentum, McCabe questions why people feel compelled to visit authors’ houses, and she also recounts (in detail) the ways in which those experiences are both reinforcing and disappointing. The book touches on something that is both deeply personal and yet also universal for so many readers (predominately female ones). This is a very girl-centred book. I alternated between feeling fascinated, amused and bored by the level of detail (and judgement) which McCabe chose to share with her own readers. Many readers who accompany McCabe on her ‘journey’ will conclude that they need not take any of these literary pilgrimages themselves - as McCabe has already narrated both the highs and lows, and somehow made all of these places seem so small and prosaic.
Overall, though, I felt indulgently fond - or fondly indulgent - of this writer/reader and her quest/project. ...more
It’s interesting to reread a book that I know well, but from the vantage point of having at least two decades of marriage under my belt. Unlike those It’s interesting to reread a book that I know well, but from the vantage point of having at least two decades of marriage under my belt. Unlike those other great 19th century romance/tragedies - I’m thinking Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina - Edith Wharton’s ‘Old New York’ love triangle is a pretty tepid affair. The protagonist Newland Archer may think of risking everything (well, honour and reputation) for love, but in the end he backs off (or rather isn’t required) to make that sacrifice. I’m pretty sure the longings of Newland for Countess Olenska used to seem more romantic to me; in reality, their ‘love affair’ doesn’t really add up to much. It’s as if they are both great projection screens: and while Newland projects safety, security and moral probity to Countess Olenska, she seems to represent the sophistication (both emotional and aesthetic) and greater sensitivity of Europe for him. Their love affair, such as it is, is really based on just a few meetings - and most of them are concerned with the question about whether or not Countess Olenska (Ellen) should return to her licentious Polish husband. Romance wants us to believe in ‘love at first sight’ and physical chemistry, but these two are not much more than representations for the other.
Newland, described as a ‘dilettante’, sees himself as a secret rebel; an objective observer of the more absurd rites of what would later be known as ‘The First Four Hundred’ of Old New York. At the beginning of the novel he is almost smug about his choice of bride: the unimpeachable May Welland. But after meeting Ellen, he begins to doubt whether the perfectly behaved May is the right wife for him after all. He has a dim sense that her perfect innocence and amiability are a form of cunning, even if she is not entirely aware of any duplicitiousness. But emotional honesty is not at all the thing in their world, and Newland feels isolated in his (ambivalent) desire that it be otherwise.
We never know much about May Welland, because Newland never knows much about her. Is there anything to know under her well-mannered serene surface? There is a rather chilling statement at the beginning of the novel about May’s seeming ‘frankness and innocence’. “But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of fictitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.”
Newland Archer is a confusing character, because on one hand we are asked to sympathise with him and feel for his emotional sacrifices - but on the other hand, the world is ordered for his comfort, even if it does occasionally bind and restrain him. In the end, he prefers his fantasies to reality - and that is simultaneously poignant and maddening to me.
As his oldest son observes about his parents’ marriage: ”You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!”
It’s all very elegantly constructed, but just like the world Wharton portrays - this is more a story of form than feeling....more
I'm not really objective on the subject of Little Women; it's been a part of my life for so long, and the characters feel like part of my own family. I'm not really objective on the subject of Little Women; it's been a part of my life for so long, and the characters feel like part of my own family. As it starts with a famous Christmas scene, it has long been associated in my mind with books that feature Christmas. And even though it makes much of the Christian virtues of charity, benevolence and even self-sacrifice, the vibrant personalities of the characters - and in particular that of Jo - keep the novel from feeling too wholesome and preachy. I can't say the same about the rest of the stories in this collection. Unless really simplistic and pious stories appeal to you, I think most readers will find this collection full of fluff and treacle. Many of the stories do feature the underdogs of society - poor children living in boarding houses, or an orphan working as a house servant - but the story feels like it IS about the moral, and not much else. I did enjoy the last story in the collection, Mrs. Podgers' Teapot, a bit more, mostly because the characters had a bit more life to them, but overall I thought these Christmas stories lacked interest. Better to reread A Christmas Carol if you want to read about Victorian Christmas. 2.5 stars ...more
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