MarysLibrary

Lady's Maid

Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lily Wilson is not in her first youth when she is hired in 1844 to be lady’s maid to Elizabeth Barrett. She finds a seriously dysfunctional family, under the complete control of the Barrett father, who forbids any of his children to marry. When Lily arrives Elizabeth Barrett is seriously neurotic, but also suffering from an unidentified lung condition and an addiction to opiates. With the help of Elizabeth’s sisters Lily slowly encourages EB to leave the house and eventually to take walks in the park.

Lily Wilson was a real person though no letters to or from her have been found and all we know of her is what we read in EB’s letters, a highly biased account. Margaret Forster has taken the few things we know about Lily and the many things we know about EB and created a first-rate novel.

Lily would like to marry and have children but she has trouble finding a man since “followers” are forbidden in the Barrett household. When EB becomes friends with Robert Browning, falls in love with him, and then secretly marries him in 1845 Lily sees a chance for herself when she accompanies them to Italy.

I stopped reading there, at the end of Part I. The book continues on to tell of the birth of EBB’s son and her death in 1861 and the story of Lily’s marriages and children but I decided to stop and just enjoy this first part, which works as a self-contained short novel. The book was published in 1990 so you may need to go to a library or ABE.com to find a copy.

2011 No 56 Coming soon: Rawhide Down

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Some Tame Gazelle

Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rereading Barbara Pym periodically is enlightening. When I first encountered her books I thought they were somewhat amusing but not in the least profound. As I grow older I recognize how perceptive she is in her depiction of unmarried middle aged women whose lives have constricted to the daily round and the common task with its small pleasures and pains.

Pym was born in 1913 and was 37 when Some Tame Gazelle was published in 1950, but she showed a remarkable sensitivity to women in their 50s, spinsters, “old maids,” and in this as in many of her books, the “odd women,” those whose men, the men they would have married, were killed in the First World War. Later in her life Pym and her sister lived together in a cottage in a small village as the sisters Belinda and Harriet Bede do in this novel.

The title comes from an obscure early 19th century poet, Thomas Haynes Bayly,

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love.

Belinda, through whose eyes we see most of the story, quotes this couplet, understanding that her sister’s doting on a series of young curates and her own holding fast for 25 years to her love of Archdeacon Hoccleve demonstrate this need to love someone, something.

The plot is simple. The archdeacon’s wife, Agatha, goes on vacation to a German spa without her husband in what is clearly an attempt to get away from the self-centered, lazy, and uncaring cleric. He uses this time to remind Belinda that they were once in love and that perhaps he made the wrong choice in marrying Agatha, something that is on Belinda’s mind at all times and which, coming from the archdeacon, pleases her but makes her uncomfortable.

Some old friends visit the archdeacon and one of them proposes to Harriet but is spurned. Then Agatha returns bringing with her the Bishop of Mbawawa who in his youth was one of the first of Harriet’s coddled curates. Belinda expects him, too, to propose to Harriet and fears that Harriet will accept. But Belinda is in for a surprise. Though the book ends with two marriages they are presented with humor and not a little irony rather than satisfaction. Pym does not provide traditionally happy endings.

2011 No 55

Wishlist

 
The original ruby slippers.

 

Triumph of the City

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward Glaeser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Edward Glaeser, economist and the author of Triumph of the City, holds some very strong and unpopular opinions. He is critical of preservationists, pointing out that they now have control over the growth and development of cities. He believes environmentalists have made destructive decisions and particularly criticizes the Save the Bay organization in California. And he wants to see cities with many more sky scrapers and many fewer ordinances restricting height, and this includes Paris!

After a quick historical overview of the importance of cities in creating new ideas out of many old ones shuffling against one another, as in Brunelleschi’s Florence and late-19th century Berlin, he makes a plea for affordable cities where creative young people can congregate and learn from one another.

An important part of his theory is the disastrous increase in housing costs in cities like New York, Paris, and San Francisco, which mean that only the very rich, who can afford the high prices, and the very poor, especially immigrants, who need the many jobs a city provides, remain. He calls London a luxury resort where rich people own property that lies empty much of the time while people who would like to live there cannot afford it because development is so restricted, raising prices of existing real estate.

He contrasts expensive cities like Boston and New York with affordable cities like Atlanta and Houston, and points out that Houston has no zoning and both have few limits on development. This means houses and apartments are built to meet demand and prices remain within reach of young families and singles.

He describes cities in India like Bangalore and Mumbai that seem to be teeming slums and describes them instead as vibrant, living places. He explains the paradox of cities: as local government provides for the rural poor who have flocked to these cities, providing better housing, sanitation, education, and transportation – more people come to the city. Rural poverty, as he points out, is much more grim and inescapable that urban poverty, which is a different kind of poverty altogether.

He warns the developing cities of India and China not to follow the example of the United States with its sprawl but rather to create a city like Singapore where there is very little land (Singapore is an island) and the city has been forced to build up rather than out. High density makes for more interaction between people and that has always led to innovation and change. When an area forbids building and that area is like California where the heating and cooling costs are negligible, the people will go somewhere else, like Las Vegas, where the costs are substantial and the “carbon footprint” of each dwelling is much greater than that of one in a temperate city.

Glaeser’s book is full of astonishing statistics (and the footnotes to back them up) and is surprisingly easy and quick to read, considering the seriousness of the subject. I disagree with him about a great many things, but I think his book is brilliant and is the sort of work that should be widely read and much talked about.

2011 No 54 Coming soon: Some Tame Gazelle, by Barbara Pym

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Quotable

Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astair did, only she did it backwards and in high heels.

-- Ann Richards, Democratic Governor of Texas (I wonder if she realized Ginger Rogers was a conservative Republican)

 

An Object of Beauty

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At the Academy Awards they always introduce the winners as “multi-talented.” Normally that means they can walk and chew gum at the same time. But in the case of Steve Martin, author of An Object of Beauty, an Emmy, Grammys, a very successful career as a comedian and actor, and two excellent books of fiction, not to mention a stageplay, screenplays, a children’s book, a comedy collection, and pieces for the New Yorker and the New York Times, qualify him as a 21st century Renaissance man.

My friend Les told me to read this novel and I’ve learned over the years that when Les recommends a book it’s worth my while to get my hands on it. Once again that has proven true. An Object of Beauty is so well written, so clever, so well plotted, so witty, filled with such lively characters and such an ironic view of contemporary art that it scintillates. I wish it were twice as long.

The story, which takes place in the New York City art world between about 1991 and 2009, is the tale of Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. (Why Joyce Carol Oates, in a blurb on the back, compares it to The Age of Innocence, with which it has almost nothing in common, is a mystery unless she made an embarrassing error, and even more puzzling is why no editor caught the gaffe.) Lily Bart was innocent and brought down by rumors started by rivals but Lacey Yeager is far from the innocent.

Lacey meets young, innocent, and somewhat passive Jamesian narrator when they are both students at the quintessentially southern Davidson College in North Carolina. When they both graduate and go to NY City to make their way in the art world they stay in touch. She becomes a dealer and he is a writer for an art magazine.

The book starts out with a couple of gentle teasers: “I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, and see it bound and tidy on my bookshelf, I will be unable to ever write about anything else.” From page 4: “It was apparent to everyone that Lacey was headed somewhere, though her path often left blood in the water.” Why can’t the now world-weary narrator forget her? Why must he write about her? Whose blood is it in the water? Could it be the narrator’s?

We quickly become fond of Daniel Chester French Franks (and with a name like that we see how he was drawn to the art world.) And we worry that he is out of his depth with this beautiful, brilliant, vibrant, witty, and unscrupulous woman who, starting as one of “the spice rack of girls at Sotheby’s,” works her way up through the years to owning her own gallery. The story is crisp and moves very quickly. The dialogue is laugh-aloud funny at times and the evolution of Lacey from naïve beginner to ruthless competitor is deeply engrossing. Trollope lovers will find it worth their while to take a look at this book.

2011 No 53 Coming soon: Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser


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Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s not much new to say by about this Jane Austen novel except that like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey still, on the third or fourth reading has something to offer. The main character, Catherine Morland, and the man she falls in love with at first sight, Henry Tilney, are just as fresh and charming now as they were in 1817 when they first met the public.

The book was written between the years 1789 and 1799 and after revisions was sold to a bookseller, Crosby & Co, in 1803. They decided not to publish it (thus missing out on the chance to go down in history as the first to publish an author who is selling better in 2011 than she did at the time of her death.) In 1817 Austen’s brother bought the novel back from Crosby for the same amount they paid for it, 10 pounds. And it was finally published shortly after the author’s death.

In this reading I was interested to notice how many titles of other novels of the time are mentioned. The book is a satire on the Gothic novels of the day, including most prominently The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Also mentioned are three novels by Frances Burney, Camilla, Cecilia, and The Wanderer. Burney’s best known novel is Evelina.

There are two characters in this book who are terrible people, with no redeeming social value: General Tilney, whose selfishness and self-indulgence make the lives of his children miserable and who is rude to the point of cruelty to our heroine; and John Thorpe, an arrogant and lying young man who leads Catherine into difficulties that might have ruined her friendship with the Tilneys. Jane Austen doesn’t usually create characters who are evil; they tend to be silly and however wrong their behavior we can normally laugh at them. Not these two.

Although perhaps Jane Austen’s weakest novel (there are centuries-long conflicts about these matters), Northanger Abbey is certainly worth re-reading.

2011 No 52 Coming soon: An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin


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Wishlist

Available at Amazon.com for $310.54. I must at least get a look at this set of books. 

 

World Made by Hand

World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Strange book, this. It’s written by James Howard Kunstler, the author of the brilliant 1994 book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. World Made by Hand is fiction, however, and it portrays a world that has disintegrated because of terrorist bombings, the loss of oil imports, and the breakdown in American society. No more cars, no more electricity, and no more of the myriad things we have come to accept almost without thought: antibiotics, grocery stores, paved roads, and most other things that can’t be harvested from abandoned property. (The narrator/protagonist’s dream is to be able to afford a horse of his own.)

I don’t read these things. No sci fi, fantasy, time travel, dystopian futuristic novels. But I thought (I still think) Kunstler’s ideas about the ridiculous way we misuse and overuse resources and his analysis of suburbia and sprawl are brilliant and when somebody mentioned he had written this novel I thought I had better give it a go.

And I liked it. It has lots of flaws, not a lot of subtle characterization, and not that much action, really. But it is interesting for the portrayal of a town in upstate New York that is doing its best to maintain a civilized society and to cope with a world in which almost everything is made by hand.

2011 No 51 Coming soon: Northanger Abbey

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5 Things You Didn't Know about Agatha Christie

1. Her father was an American
2. She went to finishing school
3. She lived as a child in a country house near Torquay
4. She was a trained pharmacist
5. She considered The Mystery of the Blue Train as her worst book. It was one of her most successful.