A Work in Progress

Teaser Tuesday: Quartet in Autumn

Barbara Pym has such a knack for telling a story of seemingly misfits and eccentrics with a deftness and lightness of touch that you just can't help smiling to yourself.  Buried in Print and I decided (well, maybe I sort of nudged but happily BiP is a willing partner in reading) on whim to pick a Barbara Pym novel and decided on Quartet in Autumn--a reread for BiP but a first go for me (and this is a novel I had wanted to read last summer when I bought the lovely Picador reissue that you see here).  What I like about Pym's novels is that I often see bits of myself in her characters, and what I like more is that they (or maybe she) doesn't take themselves/herself too seriously.

This is a novel set in 1970s London.  It follows a quartet of friends (colleagues in an office) who are in the autumn of their lives.  Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia.  "Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and - perhaps most keenly felt their worries about having missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them."  And since this is Pym, we're talking stylish, sparkling prose.

On the day we meet them, all four have (though not together) visited the library.  So, of course, this is where I draw my teaser from.

"Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification.  She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.  Gone were the days when she had hopefully filled her Boots Book Lovers' library list from novels reviewed in Sunday papers, and there had now been a change in her reading habits.  Unable to find what she needed in 'romantic' novels, Letty had turned to biographies of which there was no dearth.  And because these were 'true'  they were really better than fiction.  Not perhaps better than Jane Austen or Tolstoy, which she had not read anyway, but certainly more 'worth while' than the works of any modern novelist."

Edwin's visit is to consult reference works for research on a certain clergyman, Marcia uses the library as a warm place away from the office for a change of scenery, a place to pick up free leaflets and also a place to dispose of unwanted objects (not rubbish for the dustbin mind you, but other unclassified objects that could be left in a corner somewhere).

Maybe modern novelists don't write about people of a certain age who are solitary souls, but lucky for us Barbara Pym does.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

Molly Bolt is one of the most genuine, funny and delightful heroines in all of literature for me.  She's spirited and sassy and I would be pleased to have her as a friend.  She has then, been added to the official roster of most favorite characters of mine.  If I could snap my fingers and make her appear or if I could sit next to her at a dinner party I would do so in a heart-beat.  The Molly Bolt I speak of is Rita Mae Brown's creation in her, what surely must have reached iconic status by now (or at least the label modern classic), novel Rubyfruit Jungle.  The book was published in 1973 and I wonder what the reading public must have made of it back then.

In Brown's introduction she tells the reader that if her book helped make us feel we are not alone--good, and if she made us laugh, even better.  My story may not be exactly like Molly's, but her wish for a happy and fulfilling life doing the things she loves certainly makes me feel like my own searching is not so unlike others'.  And darn if I didn't laugh out loud reading this book.  Sometimes so much so, that I had to look around and see if people were giving me odd stares.  It's not often that a story brings the sort of tears to my eyes that come hand in hand with a smile. 

I think what I admire so much about Molly Bolt is that she is utterly true to herself and unapologetically so.  That is something we should all strive for.  She was true to herself in a time when it was not much accepted to march to the beat of your own drummer.  In an ignominious moment of argument with her mother, she discovers she is not in fact her blood daughter but a bastard and anytime someone calls someone else a bastard it means the person was bad.  Orphaned and a hoyden on top of it all.  She runs with the boys and can outwit them and outargue them.  This is Molly's response when a classmate tells her she can't be a doctor:

"I got to be the doctor because I'm the smart one and being a girl don't matter."

"You'll see.  You think you can do what boys do but you're going to be a nurse, no two ways about it.  It doesn't matter about brains, brains don't count.  What counts is whether you're a boy or a girl."

And in 1950s America that was probably true, but Molly doesn't buy into it.  Her dreams and her lifestyle are not at all "conventional", but she never tries to be someone she is not.  That surely must even now give readers pause and comfort.  As a matter of fact despite seeming so unconventional she is actually quite normal, however paradoxical that sounds.  She has no hang ups about what she wants or who she wants.  Her cousin Leroy, with whom she has a close relationship growing up tells her he doesn't care how she wants to be (like riding just the sort of motorcycle he most wants), but then he gets confused--"how do I know how to act if you act the same way?"  And she tells him, "what Goddamn difference does it make to you what I do?  You do what you want and I do what I want." 

For a young girl, raised by a stepmother who wishes she would act properly and a stepfather who loves her unconditionally, in a closed-minded and dirt-poor environment, Molly turns out to be well-grounded.  It's not how she sees the world but how the world treats her.  She shows a strength and resilience that can be hard to come by for many of us. 

"I had no mother, no father, no roots, no biological similarities called sisters and brothers.  And for a future I didn't want a split-level home with a station wagon, pastel refrigerator, and a houseful of blonde children evenly spaced through the years. I didn't want to walk into the pages of McCall's magazine and become the model housewife.  I didn't even want a husband or any man for that matter.  I wanted to go my own way.  That's all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there.  Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain.  I'd rather be alone."

I wonder if not having those close family ties was less a hindrance for Molly and perhaps more a help since she had no context to worry about, no added pressure to be one of a group.  She could invent or reinvent herself in a way most pleasing.  This is a book that should be widely read, maybe everyone should read it.  It's a reminder that what matters is what's inside--intentions and truth.  And that not everyone's story is the same and that is okay.  Life is never neat and tidy and people don't fit into easy categories.  By the end of the story Molly has only made a small step into her future life, confronted almost immediately by obstacles due to her sex.  As characters go, she certainly holds up well over time and I only hope that forty years on her wished for ending and the struggle to achieve her dreams has been overcome and reached.  Something tells me that even if she hadn't by the end of the story she would always be hopeful.

"Leroy bet me I couldn't find a pot of gold at the end, and I told him that was a stupid bet because the rainbow was enough."

Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner

Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar, published in 1975, was based on a true crime that had happened only two years previously.  It was made into a film in 1977, and while I had a recollection of seeing parts of the film and have long had the book on my shelves and so was familiar with the story, turning that last page and seeing the story play out to its tragic and terrifying end was still shocking for me.  What drives a woman to such destructive behavior?  Picking up random men in bars and taking them home to have sex with them.  Rossner has created a stunning portrait of a woman in an era of liberation and sexual revolution.  I don't think she was looking for love, at least not in the sense that most people tend to look for it through meaningful relationships, but it would seem that everything in her life was setting her up for that horrifying moment.

In less than 300 pages Rossner has created a very convincing portrait of a complex and complicated young woman.  It's quite a journey from her troubling youth to the beloved and talented schoolteacher she became who trawled the singles' bars looking to hook up with men.  Here's Theresa Dunn's sad trajectory in life.

As a girl, the youngest sister of three (and a favored older brother who was killed in a training camp accident when he was just fresh out of high school), she was raised Catholic in an Irish-American household but always felt the ugly duckling.  As a girl she contracted polio and later would have to spend a year in hospital after having to have surgery on her back to correct the subsequent curvature of the spine, or scoliosis that came along with it (I have vague recollections of having my own back checked for scoliosis in school curiously).  She never felt quite as good or as loved or as close to her parents as her sisters appeared to be.   It all seemed to come easy for them-both looks and meaningful close relationships.

While her sisters were getting married, becoming involved in serious love affairs, trying to have babies (or getting pregnant at the wrong time and then having abortions) she went off to college to study to become a teacher.  There she falls for one of her instructors, an English teacher who is himself a writer.  She and half the other women are in love with or have crushes on him.  But Theresa is smart and talented even if she can't quite believe it of herself.  Maybe she is a bit of a wallflower, afraid to share her scars and so keeps them all hidden (both the real and perceived).  But when she realizes she has his admiration and an interest in a no-strings-attached (at least for him as a married man with children) flirtation she begins to come into her own.  She falls for him.  They have a relationship for the whole of her college years, both romantically and as his scholarly assistant.  And she comes into her own in a sense.  In a way, this is her liberation from at least some of the insecurities she felt growing up. 

No more wallflower but a woman who speaks her mind with irony and sometimes sarcasm and a sense that she has a power at least sexually and intellectually.  She becomes a teacher herself, though to small children and despite her desire to continue on, the teacher-student relationship must come to an end.  She has little desire for any sort of serious relationship after that.  Is it a sense of rejection she felt?  She never seems to have a wish to marry and knows inherently that she will never be able to have children thanks to her own childhood illnesses.  In a way that opens up the possibilities to have physical relationships with few repercussions.  One of her sisters, with a string of failed relationships behind her introduces Theresa to parties where both drugs and sexual partners are ample. 

Is it liberation she feels when she goes looking for men?  Or is it deep down a lack of self-respect.  By day she is a respected teacher who is good at her job.  Her fellow teachers try and set her up with available and successful men or get involved in self-awareness groups.  But it seems almost like she wants to sabotage her own happiness.  Instead of truly falling for the one man who truly loves her, admires her, respects her and would happily have a serious relationship with an eye towards marriage, she is drawn instead to a man who only belittles her, uses her, is likely involved in seedy or underhanded business.  But one relationship is sexually fulfilling, a little wild and reckless, and the other quite tame, tender and hesitant.  But in those last, harrowing moments of her life it is the one man who cares for her that she calls out to. 

In the novel, and perhaps--as this is based on actual events--in one woman's (how many women really . . .) real life, too, Theresa goes looking for men in places like Mr. Goodbar, reading her book, accepting drinks and then taking strange men back to her apartment.  Only sadly for Theresa, she chose the wrong man to take home. Whatever fulfillment or release or sense of happiness she was looking for was paid for with her life. 

One of the blurbs on the book calls this "an emotional hurricane" and indeed it leaves the reader feeling utterly drained at the end.  It is a story, a portrait of a woman, that will likely stay with me for a very long time.

Reading the 1970s Progress

I've been quite enjoying my 1970s reading.  It makes for a good change from the usual interwar novels I tend to pick up most often.  I've finished several books and have a few more on the go.  I am hoping to still read at least two more.  I thought I would try and wrap up my summer reading project by the end of August, but if I stick to my ambitious plans still, I might have to let my reading flow over into September (ah, September, doesn't that sound nice?  Nice and crisp and cooler . . .). 

So far I have been to ca. 1970s (actually the book was written just on the cusp of 1970) London with Deborah Moggach's A Quiet Drink, which was a wonderful social comedy.

I mixed in a little more crime with Laura Wilson's marvelous (marvelously harrowing) Hello, Bunny Alice.  I definitely will be reading more of her work and wouldn't mind finding more crime novels set in the 70s (like my recent discovery of Lawrence Block).  I don't seem to have tried very hard (looking at that original list) to find mysteries or crime novels set in the 1970s though surely there must be loads of them.  Maybe I should dig out that lone P.D. James that made the list!  There are a few Ruth Rendell novels published in the 70s.   

Talk about disturbing, I finished Judith Rossner's excellent Looking for Mr. Goodbar earlier this month and I plan on writing more about it this week.  It is a very impressive character sketch but even a week later and I am still thinking about the story.  I saw bits of the film adaptation a very long time ago, so the ending was not a surprise, but it still felt shocking to me.  Now I am trying to tack down a copy of the DVD to watch the film and see how book and adaptation compare. 

I am in the middle of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, which may well end up on my ten best list at the end of the year.  I read the novel after college but too much time has passed and it feels like I am discovering it all over again.  I had forgotten what a great writer Brown is and how utterly hilarious the story can be.  I literally was laughing out loud when I was reading the book at the gym last week.  Had I been drinking a soda I am sure I would nearly have choked on it and had it coming up my nose--sorry for being too descriptive there, but somehow I think Molly Bolt, the novel's narrator, would understand.  It is a most gulpable book and I have already been looking at what else by her I might and should read.  It is an equally heavy subject matter yet Brown handles it all with a deft and light touch--very much suited for the story (just as the Rossner had the right tone, too). 

Two books I need to get back to (too many books on the go, not enough time to read all of them--the usual story) are William Boyd's Restless and my July NYRB selection D.G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe.  The Boyd straddles several time periods including the 70s, though it was written not too many years back.  The Compton was published in 1974.

As for what is waiting in the wings?  Along with perhaps finding another crime novel, I have three other very different novels that I would like to read/reread.  The first two are novels published in the 1970s: The Backward Shadow by Lynn Reid Banks (a sequel to The L Shaped Room, which I loved), and Jacqueline Susann's Once is Not Enough (which I dug out of my book piles this past weekend!).  I love the quote on the back of the book that was given by Library Journal . . . "Spectacularly successful.  There are plane crashes, drug orgies, motorcycle accidents, mass rapes, attempted abortions, suicide, evil doctors and assorted other activities; and I couldn't put the damned thing down."  Yikes.  I'm just curious about the other assorted activities!  And evil doctors?  Sounds like great fun.  A novel that oozes naughtiness.  I know it was a bestseller!  And I have a great desire to reread Edeet Ravel's Ten Thousand Lovers which is set in 1970s Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  It is the first of a trilogy of novels.  Ravel was born and raised on an Israeli Kibbutz but now lives in Canada.  I have been itching to get back to my Israeli novels for a while now (either by Israeli authors or set there).

So, this is only one of my current 'reading paths' that is keeping me busy.  I will have to share my other in progress books as I do have a nice selection (and varied) of really good books right now.  Spoiled for choice when it comes to which one to reach for at any given moment.  I have a short vacation to looking forward to in just under three weeks.  The question, of course, will be which books to come with me?  I will likely mostly take in progress books but I think I will very likely treat myself to a new read, too (but I am getting ahead of myself).  For now I am just enjoying my literary travels through the 70s.

A Quiet Drink, Deborah Moggach

A comedy of errors.  Social comedy worthy of Barbara Pym is Deborah Moggach's wonderful A Quiet Drink.  This is the sort of story where you know two people are going to come together, only it takes most of the book to happen, and then when it does it is a quick delight, a disaster and then an unexpected though perfect ending that almost really couldn't conclude any other way.  And Deborah Moggach pulls it all off spectacularly. 

"It is a sly stroke of chance which brings Claudia and Steve together.  Yet neither could know how far the consequences of a quiet drink would reach . . ."

Claudia was married to Adrian, but he's left her for Beth.  It was a reasonably amicable split, though she'll feel bad when she finds out that Beth is pregnant.  Now she lives in a flat where if she drops a pencil no one else will pick it up off the floor unless she does so.  It could sit there for weeks unattended.  Claudia works for Yours magazine.

Steve is lately married to June.  He's a cosmetics salesman who will face something of a moral crisis when he meets a woman who works for a nonprofit trying to stop cruelty to animals (including stopping cosmetics firms from experimenting on animals).  But that's a bit of an aside.  He's fallen hard for June because she's so beautiful, but once they are married she stops working and becomes a rather stodgy housewife and not the wild pussycat he had expected (or at any rate, she's not one any longer).

June worked for a store selling cosmetics and would cross paths with Steve every time he came in to sell new items and tweak the store's displays.  June is charming and pretty and the two are immediately attracted.  However she knows she is not terribly ambitious and not in really the smartest cookie in the package, though she does try and educate herself in a way that will make her more interesting to Steve.  She likes improving their home and looks forward to new carpeting.

The new carpeting is bypassed when Steven uses the money to donate to the firm trying to save the animals.  All for nothing as the woman he's trying to impress is mostly indifferent.  June has no idea.

Claudia decides to take in a lodger and after a number of interviews with prospective roommates she settles on Alistair who works as a librarian.  A nice fellow, a little odd.  He has a mum somewhere out in the boonies.  He keeps diaries which Claudia begins reading, both repelled by her behavior and unable to stop herself.  She feels she must invite him to eat with her at mealtimes.  It's very awkward as you might imagine.

June begins going to the library when Steve is off on his business calls and crosses paths with Alistair but they are only interested in the exchange of ideas and information. 

Claudia's best friend Verity is married to Wil.  They have several children.  She grows their food and is all natural in her outlook on life and raising a family.  They live in the outer suburbs.  Maybe even further than that.  Wil commutes into London for work.  Wil makes a pass at Claudia.  She almost regrets not taking him up on it fully since there is not so much as a look from an eligible man otherwise. 

Claudia and Steve meet when his cosmetics firm has business with her magazine, Yours.  They cross paths.  They go for a quiet drink.

And this is where it all gets really good.

Characters meeting up, crossing paths, circling each other's orbits.  Until one cut finger and a lack of sticking plasters threatens to unravel it all . . .

Social comedy extraordinaire. 

I can see this as a movie!

It was published in 1980.  It doesn't in any way feel dated to me, yet it oozes that period. 

I could pick it up again Right Now and start reading it once more. 

Deborah Moggach is a delight, but I think I mentioned that to you already.

I have almost all her books.

Yes, I am going to read more. 

Very likely one of my best reads of the year. 

A Little Needlework, and Some Bookishness

I've been a little remiss about sharing my needlework progress, but to be honest there has not been as much progress as I would have liked over the long weekend.  So, here is where I left off last time around.

Not much new to look at, is there?  But every little bit helps and over time it does add up.  Happily my little robin now has a mate, or a companion in any case.  And they do look rather companionable sitting on their branches, don't they?  My next needlework goal is to finish stitching the house; as a matter of fact I hope to finish stitching that entire upper area where the house and birds sit.  I am ready to begin on my Summer Sampler, so the sooner I finish with Spring the better!  And I still want another project on the go--something long term is okay.  Maybe a larger project, a Quaker sampler perhaps, where I can just at a new motif or so each week.

***

Let's see, in bookish news my 1970s reading continues.  I will be writing about Deborah Moggach's A Quiet Drink next week.  It just happened that I had picked it up to read and the setting/period coincided with my reading plans.  It is another reminder of just how much I like her writing.  

Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar is my 'big' 70s read at the moment.  It's based on a true story and was written in 1975, so it's smack dab in the middle of the sexual revolution and I suspect there is probably an interesting Feminist reading of the book I might explore.  While William Boyd's Restless (one of those books I have long wanted to read but never seem to have gotten around to picking up . . . until now) moves around in time, but story is told from that long, hot British summer of 1976.  So it not only is the right time, but there is the added benefit of it being a spy story and with a female protagonist.  In the case of both books, there is the added possibility, too, of watching the film adaptations.

Is it too soon to be thinking about my next 1970s book choice?  At the moment I am leaning towards either a novel that focuses on diversity like something by Rita Mae Brown or Andrew Holleran or Erich Segal's famous "love means never having to say you're sorry" novel (not sure I agree with that one!).  But you know how whims can change in the blink of an eye.

I've fallen behind in my NYRB reading.  I've been doing really well this year in keeping up with the books as they come in, but Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea proved to be a book that was interesting when I picked it up, but I was not feeling overly compelled to reach for it as often as I needed to.  I general sign of how my nonfiction reading seems to be going this year.  And then Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel came in the mail, which I was eager to dive into.  I have heard many good things about the novel, but once again I am finding it a slowish going story, or perhaps I am not quite far enough into it to be really engaged with the characters.  It's the sort of book you need to spend a nice chunk of time with to get involved with what is going on--not the sort of book to read in short bursts I think.  And now my July book should be coming any day.  It is D.G. Compton's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (fittingly published in 1974!), and is a science fiction novel that sounds quite intriguing.  I am hoping it will jump start my NYRB reading.  I will persevere with the last two books as well--just keep chipping away at them since one of my goals this year is to read all my subscription books by the end of the year (preferably not all at once but as they come out!).

I decided it was time to stop 'thinking' about reading a classic and just make a choice and stick with it.  So I have picked up M.E. Braddon's novella The Lawyer's Secret.  It's short (about 120 pages) and who can resist a good Victorian melodrama?  Now that I have publicly announced my newest read, I have to stick with it.

Now for my current reading whim . . . in search of a book moment (which I seem to have a new one each week).  I've been feeling tired and frumpy and generally uninspired by life in my own corner of the world.  Personal life, I should say.  There is already far too much going on otherwise in the world, so maybe I should be happy and careful for what I wish for.  But I need a good story about a woman of 'a certain age' (I fear I am that age, whatever it is) who reinvents herself.  Did you ever see the wonderful movie Shirley Valentine?  So, I am not married nor do I have children of any age, but anyone can still be in a rut.  Yes, rut is a good word for it.  I need a Shirley Valentine sort of read.   Something a little satirical but humorous and hopefully happy in the end--nothing dark please.  Maybe something by Barbara Pym, or a Mrs. Pollifax novel?  I think Mrs. Pollifax is a widowed grandma, which is a little outside my own experience, but I do like the espionage slant.  Along those lines is what I am in need of I think.  If you have a suggestion, please do share.  

And in the interim, I just discovered that the third season of the Great British Baking Show are now in progress.  I have already missed the first episode, but I will quickly catch up.  I am not a cook or a baker, but I love this show and can watch it endlessly.  So, a little cause for happy celebration this weekend.   

Hello Bunny Alice, Laura Wilson

Do you remember Playboy Bunnies?  I think their heyday was somewhere in the 1960s and 70s.  They really seem representative of that era (and one of the aspects of which I am not unhappy to see no longer in vogue).  Laura Wilson's Hello Bunny Alice is steeped in 1970s aura and fittingly has a 'retired' Bunny as the protagonist who is terrorized for reasons she only slowly comes to understand by her dead lover's best friend.  Laura Wilson writes a detective series set in WWII London featuring DI Ted Stratton and MI5 agent Diana Calthrop, which I am looking forward to reading.  However, she has also written a number of crime novels that have been compared to some of my favorites--Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters and Frances Fyfield.  The comparisons are well deserved and I'll be reading through her crime novels as well as the Stratton mysteries. 

Hello Bunny Alice is definitely in the realm of psychological suspense.  It's not exactly a crime novel nor a straightforward mystery, though there are elements of both.  It's a slow burn of a story.  A train wreck almost that you can't help but watch with some fascination and a fair bit of horror as events unfold.  Set in the hot and steamy British summer of 1976, I suppose this story could be set anywhere and almost anytime, but all those 70s elements make it just the right sort of story.  And perfect for my 1970s summer reading project.

In true Rendellian-style, the story opens with a newspaper cutting from 1970 about popular comic Lenny Maxted who has been hanged after battling inner demons helped along by heavy alcohol use.  You know the story, too much fame too soon.  Skyrocketing to popularity one moment, spun out of control the next, like yesterday's old news. 

" . . .there were different Lennys, I knew that: Lenny the brilliant comedian, Lenny the drunkard, angry and bitter; Lenny the lecher who went out on the town with Jack."

It's news to Alice Conway that she and Lenny had just been engaged.  Certainly they had been an item, and now he's gone.  Fast forward six years to a farm in Oxfordshire where Alice is finished with her Bunny-days and keeps animals and a very low profile.

"I had the dream again last night.  I'm at the bottom of a lake looking through the window of a car.  Everything's gin-bottle green, murky, and there's a skeleton sitting behind the wheel, dressed as a bunny girl."

August 1976 and another newspaper cutting arrives in the mail.  Alice opens her mail to find an article about a car having been found in a lake with human remains inside.  Apparently it had been there for several years.  And immediately brought to Alice's mind is Bunny Kitty who disappeared one night in 1969.  Curiously the cottage where her lover, Lenny, killed himself is on the same estate as the lake.  Surely it can't be a coincidence. 

And then the reminiscences begin.  How Alice and Lenny met--on the motorway where a little friendly car race results in an amorous afternoon in a haystack, and later he shows up at the club where she works.  They click and quickly become a couple, but how else can such a relationship end?  Lenny had been only one comic of a pair who rode the waves of fame until it all became too much.  Jack, Lenny's partner, was just as handsome but maybe a little less mercurial, at least until he shows up on Alice's doorstep.  And that's where the excitement begins.

Maybe there had always been a little spark of attraction between Jack and Alice.  But she lets him in and all the memories begin flooding back.  If Alice is haunted by the past, then Jack is even more so.  The revelations start and the bottle comes out and Jack becomes increasingly unstable.  It's a wicked and wild ride and a frightening one.  Jack's demons seem to finally come at him and all his history with Lenny overtakes his reason.  Drugs and alcohol fuel the fires and the fact that his daughter has died of starvation.  Alice cannot escape from the past or from Jack.

This is a story that has all the earmarks of the period.  Fame too much and too soon.  Bunny Girls (complete with ears and puffy tail) who work in clubs that require members to carry their keys before they'll be served, too many parties, too much booze and too many drugs, daughters who have anorexia and starve themselves, hard living comedians who run out of laughs and become desperately pathetic . . .

"You had to set up the tray with the right glasses and garnish -- olive for a Martini, lemon twist if it was dry, cocktail onion if it was a Gibson, and some drinks had cherries or other bits and pieces--before you took it up to the bar.  I knew the call-in order backwards, still do: Scotch, Canadian, Bourbon, Rye, Irish, Gin, Vodka, Rum, Brandy, Liqueurs, Mixed, Blended, Creamed, Beer, Wine, One for the money--the bottles were arranged in the same sequence so you called and the barman poured, except yours was right to left and his left to right, if you see what I mean."

Strangely, perhaps (?), I find this decade so fascinating.  I remember it but only from the perspective of a child looking into the world from the safety of outside.  I am off to quite a dramatic start, and it will be interesting to see how stories compare and perhaps and contrast and maybe even clash.

To Summer Read, or Not, is the Question

Summer has now officially arrived!  Of course the summer temperatures (and I'm referring to high summer--almost dog days of summer weather) arrived here nearly two weeks ago.  So since summer is well and truly on the mind, the question is--do I have a little summer reading project or not?  While I have plenty of books on my reading pile or in my mental queue, I think I can do a little reading project that combines a theme I have in mind with some of the books I have been thinking of reading lately.  I'm almost always thinking I need to read more mysteries and spy novels.  And I might also manage a classic, too.

So I think I have settled on . . . drum roll please . . . What did I do on summer vacation?  Reading the 70s!  Sounds like a groovy idea, right?  Don't ask me why I have  fixated on the 1970s.  I was a very young child in the 70s and have fond memories of that decade.  And now I want to relive some of it via my reading.  Besides it will make for a nice change from my usual WWI, WWII, years between the wars reading.  And I think it will still be fertile ground for some good mysteries and spy novels (am thinking good old Cold War stuff). 

Any good reading project calls for a book list to draw inspiration from.  So here I shall start a list, which will by no means be the only books I read this summer (because I, admittedly, am greedy when it comes to books, but then you knew that already) and I won't even begin to fantasize reading all the books on the list.  But variety is good to choose from.  Feel free to chime in with reading ideas if something good comes to mind.  I am thinking the books I choose will be either books written now but with a 1970s setting or popular books written (and set in) that decade. 

In no particular order, my list (to be added to as I go) of potential 1970s era summer reads:

Once is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann (1973)

Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner (1975)

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown (1973)

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran (1978)

Monkey Grip by Helen Garner (1977)

Lawrence Block mysteries (I read the first Matthew Scudder novel recently which was published in 1976)

Something by Ruth Rendell and/or Sharon McCone

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James (1977)

Love Story by Erich Segal (1970)

Summer Sisters by Judy Blume (set in 1977)

Fallout by Sadie Jones (set in the 1970s)

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (set in 1972)

Restless by William Boyd (set in part in 1976)

The Backward Shadow by Lynn Reid Banks (1972) This one is also on my beginning of the year list from last January.

The Cheer Leader by Jill McCorkle (set in early 1970s)

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Well, there will be more, I'm sure, but a jumping off place in any case.  I think I might start with the Rossner novel as I have long wanted to read it!

The Circle Line: Heads and Straights

If you look at a map of the London Underground, the Circle Line is yellow and it runs in a loop with a later addition--an extension--that looks like a digression from its normal route.  Heads and Straights is Lucy Wadham's nod towards the Tube line that runs through Chelsea and Kensington.  It is one of a dozen books published in 2013 for the 150th anniversary of the London Underground (all of which I hope to read and write about this year). 

The books are a bit of an adventure as each author was given free rein to write about whatever inspired them using each Underground Line as their springboard.  As an Anglophile who has traveled some of those Underground Lines (sadly far too long ago), though not intimate with the City and its particulars, the books are entertaining but a little like picking a chocolate from a box of bonbons.  Until you take a bite, you aren't sure what will be in the middle (or if you'll like it).

Lucy Wadham is a novelist and Heads and Straights is a most intriguing memoir of growing up in Chelsea in the 1970s.  Have you heard the term 'heads and straights'?  You can likely tell from context what the words refer to.

"The first time I admitted publicly to having been brought up in Chelsea I was thirty-five and at the launch party for my first novel, which was being held in a tapas bar in Clapham."

Thinking back on my reading in the last year or so, I've come across another Chelsea girl who drifted away into more colorful parts of London as well.  Chelsea must equate posh, and not always a welcome label to the wearer.

"Inverted snobbery was embedded in my sisters and me from an early age, so being from Chelsea was never a source of pride for any of us.  I don't know where this class shame came from, certainly not from our parents."

So, what do you think--heads and straights?  Heads are good, of course, and straights, not so much.  "Heads were people who smoked pot and Straights were people who didn't."  When you are a teenager in the 70s and are trying to be cool, it's probably pretty easy to figure out which camp you want to be a part of.  Lucy, and the Big Three as her elder sisters were known, were firmly (though some more than others) in the Heads camp.

It doesn't matter that I don't know Chelsea, this is a memoir of the personal--of growing up and wanting to be a part of as well as wanting to be apart from.  It's about family relations, parents, and even grandparents and siblings and bad choices and bad experiences and growing up and out of.  I always find it fascinating how a memoirist can segue from one subject to another, sometimes seemingly unrelated topics yet without even realizing that the distances between the two are farther than you think.  From Chelsea to siblings and parents to a grandmother who loved Virginia Woolf and passed on to her granddaughter Woolf's love of nature, teaching her names of trees and flowers that "would make us ridiculous to future boyfriends."  And then more.

"Gran's Welsh cottage was freezing and you had to put fifty p in the meter for hot water, so she often read to us in bed beneath an eiderdown so thick and heavy it was like lying under another body.  Her bed was large and we would often all squeeze in with her--'Plenty of room, come along, shove up'-and fall asleep to her radio, which she would tune to a shipping forecast, one of the few voices that still mirrored her own (very Edwardian)."

It sounds to me as though she would have come off as posh indeed, yet Gran was "busy shaking up the tree" since she took great pleasure in the girls' rebellion against their parent's very middle class lifestyle.   Heads and Straights--I guess these things tend to skip a generation.  Gran would have been a Head as well as the granddaughters and the parents most definitely Straights.

I understand being the youngest sister and I think I was in the same predicament.  Older sisters are almost always pretty cool and you are the straggler, the hanger-on.  And Lucy had sisters, those Big Three, who in some cases lived life a little too close to the edge.  When she as the youngest sister, was a "fully blown, self-loathing Straight", she must have felt a square peg.  Her first day in a new school, clothes preempted from one of her sister's closets, she realizes she looks like a "roaring Sloane" (Bad thing, I think) as if she had "Made in Chelsea" stamped onto her forehead. 

It all comes out in the end, much happier and easier than her sisters anyway.  A life story, or impressions of a life story, wonderfully told and with surely one of the best last lines, a memory, that I've come across in a long time.  And all in less than 100 pages.  A wonderful nod towards the Circle Line as it whooshes through Chelsea.

I've picked up a nature book, maybe a memoir, I'm not entirely sure as I am just now preparing to get into Richard Mabey's A Good Parcel of English Soil.  Another reading adventure.