Three novels for January
And three that didn't quite land for me
I initially passed over The Correspondent, because I thought it looked a bit cutesy. Bobby told me he also swerved it, because it looked too cosy. And then I read this by books critic Laura Hackett in The Times, saying that she initially left it in the proof cupboard, because the cover looked “a little twee”. As soon as she opened it, though: “I felt thoroughly chastened. How could I have fallen prey to the first rule of reading: don’t judge a book by its cover?” Ach! I felt exactly the same.
It is thanks to you, booksenbitters, that I picked it up the NYT’s ‘sleeper hit’ - overdue, chastened - as many of you cited it as your favourite book of the year in the Comment section of this letter. (Incidentally: there is nothing wrong with cosy, like the wildly popular cosy crime of Richard Osman. It’s just never been my personal taste.) I went straight up to my teetering piles of proofs (kept in an unused fire place in my bedroom) and winkled The Correspondent out of the book Jenga. I took it on holiday and almost as soon as I’d started, I was hooked. Nay, delighted. And then, soon, sobbing like I haven’t sobbed since I read Hamnet last summer. I was in hysterics, in fact, my husband rubbing my back as I explained the plot, before saying, after about 5 minutes, confusedly, “so this isn’t real life?” He was slightly less concerned to discover I was this undone over a novel.
But what a novel! (I said to him through my blubbing.)
The Correspondent is an epistolary novel, told through letters and occasional e-mails penned by and to our protagonist, the rather brusque Sybil Van Antwerp, a 73-year-old retired clerk living in Anapolis, Maryland. (I googled it, looks lush.) Through these letters and e-mails we learn the story of Sybil’s life: she is the mother of two grown children, who baffle and irritate her; an ex-husband who she mourns but refuses to reply to; a loving best friend weighted down by care demands; a joyful, devoted, globe-trotting brother, who she refuses to visit; a teenage boy in crisis; a customer service rep who becomes her pen pal; her sweet neighbour Theodore who grows roses and admires her across the road; and dozens of authors including Ann Patchett and Joan Didion (sometimes, blissfully, ‘they’ write back.)
“I write to anyone that strikes me. Friends, lawmakers, editors, teachers, diplomats, authors. Authors are my favourite. It’s harder now, of course, because with the internet people are e-mailing… An e-mail can in no way replace a written letter. It does concern me that one day all the advancement of technology will do away with the post, but I hope to be dead and gone long by then.”
Sybil at first appears amusingly prim - here’s she is writing to her teenage friend, Harry (the son of a lawyer she used to know) who is struggling. Nevertheless she feels compelled to tell him:
“Your handwriting is improving. Well done. It make very much of a difference in your letters. Not only are they more readable, but they seem more dignified.”
And here she is reluctantly corresponding with a bombastic retiree, Mick, who has his eye on her:
“In your letter from March you mentioned the matter of your boredom. The mind was not created for idleness… I will go for dinner with you when you are here in late August because it seems you are rather prepared to continue to ask until the end of your days, or mine.”
(Such a deliciously withering tone, which Mick finds delightful.)
But we soon learn that Sybil isn’t prim, at all - has lived a rich and storied life, full of love and hard work and grief - and cares deeply about things, particularly books, and helping people who she sees to be stuck in life, or have landed an unfair lot. (Sybil cannot bear unfairness.) Here she is corresponding with a customer service rep, Basam, at a DNA website that her brother signed her up for (they are both adopted) and which she is intensely sceptical about. She has learned that Basam is from Syria and that he has an advanced degree in engineering which he cannot use in America. They have become pen pals:
“How is your wife doing with her English course? Did she quit at the restaurant? What that boss is doing to her is harassment and surely she can find restaurant work anywhere. And how are the children? Did Zoha get glasses?”
Sybil then tells him to send her his resume, so that she can ask her son, Bruce, “honestly a bit dull, but he is also reliable and kind and takes care of me” who they could send it to. She adds:
“I DID NOT EXPLAIN HOW WE HAVE COME TO BE FRIENDS, SO PLEASE DO NOT MENTION THE DNA TESTING AS IF I AM A SUBJECT OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.”
About half way through the book you learn why Sybil refuses to travel, why she broke up with her husband, why she is unable to connect with her children. And it is learning the circumstances of her emotional bulwark that will undo you as the reader. There’s also another sub-plot, where she is receiving poison pen letters from someone she encountered long ago in her professional life. This is also enlightening, and again, allows us to see Sybil more clearly.
Sybil’s casual - often caustic - observations are a joy to read. Here she writes to her brother, Felix, about an English professor that she is positively harassing to let her sit in on an English course at the local university, something she has been allowed to do for the last 9 years (she calls it ‘auditing’, which I understand to mean she pays a nominal fee to listen to, but not participate in or turn in any coursework.) She turns up to accost the new department head who is stonewalling her insistent letters and found that:
“She was wearing these lovely earrings. They were feathers. As I mentioned, she is a very pretty woman, but she looked positively haggard. Wilted as a rotten peach. A bit of lipstick would have done her wonders.”
The Correspondent is tender, dry, sharp - wonderfully caustic - and at times, devastating, but still, somehow, a testament to the author, a feel good novel. Sybil gets another shot at love and spends much of the book in a dilemma of two men. Two! Felix adores this. She finally contends with her own motherhood - and her deliberate cool with her children. Here is Sybil to her daughter, Fiona (my god, this passage - when you know Sybil, it’s even more powerful):
“I am sorry I didn’t do better. I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.”
Sybil reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (the reluctance to love again, the difficult relationships with your grown children, the beady observation of one’s home town and the limitations of the people in it) but Sybil is a bit more modern and vibrant than Olive and it’s a broader book - there are more people, more ideas, more people, whether it’s a Syrian immigrant unable to get the job in America that he deserves, or a quirky teenager struggling with a depressed mother. Above all, The Correspondent reminds you of the treasure of correspondence: of the letters that make up a life.
I loved Laura Barnett’s 2015 novel The Versions of Us (I spoke about it once on Radio 4’s A Good Read, of which I remember nothing, because my daughter was 3 months old and I was in a savage bout of insomnia - good times!) so I’m surprised to see I’ve missed two novels written between Barnett’s debut and her fourth, Births, Deaths & Marriages, which came out last summer. I always say that if you like One Day, then you’ll love Versions of Us - a beautifully paced sliding doors novel about Eva and Jim, who we meet at 19 and follow until their 70s, through three versions of their romance. Because what is life - and love - but a series of chances and choices?
Births, Deaths & Marriages - which sounds like a Richard Curtis film and reads like it should be one - is similarly well-crafted, picking up with a group of six university friends, two decades after they graduate, as they head towards one friend’s wedding. The friends are now in their early 40s, and bound to one another through varying degrees of intimacy (from ardent love to vague loathing.)
There’s Zoe, a midwife, who was once married to Rob, who is now getting married to his older Italian lover, Gesauldo, and whose wedding everyone is attending. (Zoe likes Rob, ish - he broke her heart to smithereens when their child was a toddler, but they now fairly happily co-parent their teenage son, Gabe). There’s Al, once in love with Zoe, grieving the death of his wife a decade earlier, who doesn’t like Rob much; Indie, a flinty entrepreneur in a dying relationship with chef, Xavi, and flirting dangerously with Rob, who might be getting married but has always been terrified of commitment; Rachel, an exhausted mother of two small boys who has just learned that her husband, Mark, has lost everything, including their house. And then there’s Yas, a doctor torn by family demands past, present and future: her ill mother; her absent, dying, father; her secret pregnancy, after a one night stand.
And now they’re all coming together for the first time in over a decade, for Rob’s wedding. A wedding is a good narrative device for long-held, tightly bound tensions to explode asunder. (It reminded me of Francesca Hornak’s So Good To See You - which I really enjoyed and wrote about here - where everything also comes to a head for a bunch of university friends at a summer wedding.)
Here’s Zoe, when she sees Al again:
“How well do they know each other now, really? Not so well. It’s been a long time. She’s raised a child, delivered hundreds of others; he has lost a wife, found a new career. And yet, at Rob’s party, it had been so easy between them; he had been so much like the man she remembered: a good listener, thoughtful, weighing each response before speaking. Handsome, too; even more so, perhaps , than he had been when they were younger. Not as showy as Rob, his looks softer, his manner more diffident; but a new confidence there as well, one she does not quite remember from twenty years before.”
Births, Deaths & Marriage is also a book about motherhood, expressed through Indie’s ambivalence (Xavi wants children, Indie does not), Yas’s terrified anticipation, Zoe’s surprise parenthood aged just 22 (and her work as a midwife) and Rachel’s intense love for her children and her postnatal depression. (Two things that can be true at once.) I think this next passage so cleanly and compassionately elucidates what it feels like to be surprised and/or disappointed, by your own parenting - a fluid, shape-shifting thing that requires extraordinary amounts of energy not just in the doing but in the thinking about doing:
“[Rachel] had never expected to be this kind of parent - anxious, protective; depressed by the demands of motherhood, yet reluctant to outsource them - and perhaps she would not have been had it not been for the lockdowns, the months spent imprisoned at home with a baby and a toddler while the world went notes… ‘I wish you luck,’ the doctor had said: a woman, fiftyish from the sound of her, kind, soft-spoken, weary. ‘Nobody is meant to live like this. No mother, especially.’”
I had two children under two during the first lockdown. I shudder with the weight of memory, when I read things like this.
What I love about this book is that everything is covered. There is nothing that I was left wondering about - everything is tied up in a bow. There are no blank spaces, no mysterious silences. You know what’s happening with every character, and how everyone is feeling. When I feel particularly tired or vulnerable, this is exactly the book I want to hold me, with its thoroughness, it’s thoughtfulness. Like The Correspondent, this is not a book of happy endings, nor is it trite, but it’s a gentle, moving, immensely readable book.
Ending on a brand spanking new novel (out next week) which is absolutely not gentle, by Jeanette McCurdy, best known for her provocatively named memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, and for being one of America’s premiere childstars of the ‘00s. My husband had the odd sensation last week of being the only sentient member of our household (sorry to my toddler, he doesn’t count) to not be consuming Jeannette McCurdy content: my daughter was binge watching Sam & Cat (make it end, please make it end); my son had just discovered iCarly; and here I was, reading Half His Age.
Now, I haven’t read McCurdy’s critically acclaimed memoir (the title put me off, although I’ve since bought it on Vinted) and I was also wary of the subject matter: the student-professor relationship is a well-trodden novelistic path. Was I up for yet another story about pathetic old professors and world-weary teenage students? Apparently, in the right hands, yes. Half His Age is masterful. Beautifully written, at times disgustingly written, merciless, hilarious, mournful.
17-year-old Waldo lives in a trailer in Alaska with her absent single mother and works part-time at Victoria’s Secret. In her desperate need to feel something, anything - and sick of dating teenage boys - Waldo decides to seduce her English teacher, Mr Korgy, who has identified Waldo as one of his best students. (In turn, she becomes passionate about writing.) Korgy is clearly not a catch, aesthetically or even energetically - he’s stressed by the demands of fatherhood, resentful of his beautiful accomplished wife (and her family money), obsessed with his failed novel.
But Korgy isn’t meant to be a catch. He’s a placeholder, really, a project. And what makes the novel so rich is that there is so much else going on, other than Mr Korgy. (She never calls him by his first name, Teddy.) Waldo is addicted to junk food (“My body craves something to distract it, some form of escape”) and fast fashion -
“I know that a blush isn’t gonna transform my life, but it still nice to believe during the three-day shipping time that it could. It’s nice to believe that the only difference between me and Margot Robbie is a stick of blush. It’s nice to believe promises, even empty ones in cute typefaces on the backs of little cardboard packages… I end my night by loading up a cart on Shein despite the damning ethics of fast fashion, because it’s the only place you can get a pair of pants for twelve bucks. The cancer warning comes up on all the items, which I appreciate because it helps me prioritize my cart. Velvet trousers? Not worth the cancer. Crop top? It stays.”
And to the feeling of self-loathing she gets when she checks out yet another basket:
“Knowing the pattern doesn’t stop it. I’m powerless over the need to gorge myself on stupid things I put too much meaning on. Stupid things I know I’ll be disappointed by as soon as I see them in person.”
(And that includes Mr Korgy.)
Waldo is having a vastly different senior experience to her friends, working to support her mother, a sex and love addict who spends most of her time chasing charmless Tony with the tobacco-stained tongue, leaving post-it notes and cookies for Waldo (who cooks, cleans, does laundry, pays bills) to find in the empty trailer. She is also absolutely aware that the pathetic man child Mr Korgy is a fantasy, not her happily ever after. She knows she carries deep scars from her dad leaving them when she was a kid, her mum telling her it was because they hadn’t dressed pretty enough.
“[Mom] blows her raw, red nose into her overly soiled tissue, making it work harder than it needs, punishing it, refusing to grab a fresh one. ‘Whatever you do, don’t wind up like me.’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask. I know exactly what she means. I also know she likes to explain it to me.
‘Don’t let men run your life. Ruin your life, I should say. (Blows nose.) ‘Don’t let ‘em distract you.’ (Blows nose.)”
Waldo knows all these things, because she is smart - has been parenting her mother since she was a pre-teen - but she’s also lonely and bored and itching for a dopamine hit and - exactly as her mother put it - a distraction, from her shitty holding pattern. Seducing her teacher, the only person who actually talks to her like an interesting person, would deliver one hell of a hit. Why can’t she have this one thing?
And so she grabs it.
This book is most obviously about an inappropriate relationship and teenage desire, but it’s also a book about poverty, class, opportunity - how scant they are for someone like Waldo - and neglect. About a mother, and now a daughter, seeking quick fixes for their boredom, their unhappiness. Waldo is a product of her mother’s chaotic, unstable upbringing; she doesn’t know what healthy love or even friendship looks like - her best friend is a devout Mormon who won’t step foot inside Waldo’s home and can’t be trusted with anything truthful about Waldo (not a friend, basically). There is nothing real to Waldo about her life: even Mr Korgy is a proxy - a challenge that doesn’t feel nearly so good now she’s got him.
“Is [Mr Korgy] attempting to recreate his pleasure just the same as I am? Trying to sell it to me? Or is he just easier to please, actually present and enjoying it?”
McCurdy recently revealed that her novel, whilst not another memoir, was inspired by a relationship she once had with a much older man who “would play me music that I did not like, but I pretended to like.” In another author’s hands, this smart, dishonest teen who will do anything in service of being seen could be a depressing protagonist to hang out with. But McCurdy’s heroine is less monotone nihilism a la Otessa Moshfegh and more Miranda July, with a side of Katherine Heiny. A lot of fun to hang out with, basically, even when she’s misery masturbating with chilli cheese fingers. (And if you think that’s disgusting, wait till you get to the scene when she’s hiding in Mr Korgy’s cupboard.)
I predict a total hit for Jeanette McCurdy. I can’t wait to read her memoir.
And now to three novels that didn’t quite land for me. I’ve been thinking about folding in more of these for my paying subscribers, because I’m aware that my books posts are only ever about what I liked. That’s because the internet shits on everything all the time and I thought I’d try and redress the balance.
But actually, I began to think recently, I think it’s helpful for you to know when something didn’t quite didn’t work for me. Sometimes, when books don’t land, we think there’s something wrong with us, or the book. Neither are true. It’s just that not everything can be for everyone and thank goodness for that, quite frankly. Here are three that weren’t for me - and why they didn’t click. If they were for you, let me know. I’d love to see a different perspective on them.