The View in Winter - Ronald Blythe

The topic of this book – old age – is one people generally try to avoid. But the elderly pose problems that most families and all societies have to cope with; there’s also the fact that, in today’s world, an ever-increasing number of us will be blessed or cursed with a long life. So the subject must be addressed, and Blythe does this, thoroughly. Although some handle old age well, he finds loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of not belonging and not mattering endemic. Many of the elderly are fear-plagued – not of death, which most face with acceptance, but of losing control of their lives (a crippling fall, a fading of the mind); they fear losing their independence and becoming a burden to others. These various negative aspects are raised by the author in his introduction and commentaries, but what we get from the old people who are interviewed is a cheerful, plucky attitude, or resignation, or muted memories. And I wondered, Where’s the passion? Why doesn’t anybody express regret, anger, frustration, bitterness? Since Blythe restricted himself to the residents of one English village, it’s possible that those he spoke with were under a pressure the old commonly feel: that they must “behave.” The liveliest section is one in which young people talk about their attitudes toward the elderly; this blunt, honest, diverse dialogue has a vitality absent from the rest of the book. Even Blythe’s tone is intellectually detached. He’s insightful, unflinching and, at times, harsh. But the very complexity of his subject makes the book diffuse and scattered. Blythe wrote Winter when he was fifty-eight. I can’t help but compare it to Akenfield, which came ten years earlier. In that book people in a village spoke primarily about their jobs, and there was passion aplenty. In this look at the end of life it’s apathy that prevails.

The Garrick Year - Margaret Drabble

The following sentence, which comes halfway through this book, marks the point at which I abandoned it: “I lay there and wondered what frightful depths of need the chance words of a man whom I did not know and had no reason to like had revealed in me; and I saw then clearly what later became confused; that I was about to be chained, in a fashion so arbitrary that it frightened me, to a passion so accidental that it confirmed nothing but my own inadequacy and inability to grow.” A lot of probing, right? The critical problem is that I didn’t know the woman who was thinking these thoughts; little had been revealed about her by her words and actions. She makes a lot of claims; one of them is a deep love for her daughter, but Drabble doesn’t include one single sustained scene between the two. Even Nell’s physical appearance is sketchy; she’s supposed to be beautiful, but in my mind’s eye she remained featureless and shapeless. A book is an inanimate object, but its main character can’t be.

Brittania Mews - Margery Sharp

For 120 pages this was a good novel. We first get to know Adelaide as a ten-year-old; then the narrative skips a dozen years. What follows is her romance with her art instructor; she pursues marriage to this feckless fellow in a headstrong way. She gets what she wants, with disastrous results. The dissolution of her love – and her dreams – is handled well, as is the hardening of her nature. But in the next hundred pages my sympathy and involvement slowly eroded. The slum in which Adelaide is forced to live was never convincing; that didn’t bother me when I was involved in the dynamics of her marriage, but after Henry’s exit the stereotypical garishness of the Mews and its denizens led me to conclude that Sharp had no firsthand knowledge of that world (though she writes with authority about the moneyed class). Gilbert – the second man in her life – is abruptly introduced (he’s thrown out of a bar, drunk); they immediately form a platonic soul mate relationship. He’s easily reformed by Adelaide – far too easily. Sharp stopped trying to lay a solid groundwork. Her husband, with all his faults, was a real person; Gilbert merely serves a role. Events – such as the success of the Puppet Theatre – are predictable and improbable. As Part Four begins thirty years have passed. Young people with names like Dodo and Sonia Trent take center stage, while Adelaide has stiffened into a cardboard prop. At this point I had enough. Sharp attempted something major – a sprawling generational novel – but it was beyond her range. She was a sprinter attempting to run a marathon. As she labored through the years she lost her energy and the book turned slack and vacuous.

Cluny Brown - Margery Sharp

Twenty-year-old Cluny is described by her uncle, with whom she has lived all her life, as being “plain as a boot.” But when we get to know her she displays a buoyancy that’s engaging (she even bounds when she walks). She’s an original, a free spirit without a hint of artifice. In an early chapter a woman the uncle talks to in the park gives him a piece of advice: “I think your niece sounds exceptionally charming. You mustn’t suppress her, you must help her to develop. She may be a really special personality.” This appraisal is right on target; but rather than be developed, Cluny’s adventurous nature is stifled while she’s living with her stodgy uncle. When she’s sent to work as a servant at a country estate new worlds open for her. Sharp recognized that Cluny alone couldn’t carry the novel, so she introduces a half dozen well-drawn characters (and not a villain among them). Love is in the air, romances bloom, including one for Cluny. But the events at the end, though they have an engaging sprightliness, aren’t convincing. I think the author cared so much about her creation that, like a fairy godmother, she simply waved a magic wand and blessed Cluny with an exciting life. I can’t really blame her.

The Feast of Lupercal - Brian Moore

Moore traces the evisceration of Mr. Devine (Dev), a master at a Catholic boy’s school in Belfast. Thirty-seven years old, he’s still a virgin, though fairly content with his drab, solitary life. That life is soon to be in turmoil. He’s in a stall in the school’s men’s room when he overhears a teacher refer to him as an “old woman” with no knowledge of how a fellow could feel about a girl. Dev is stung by these words; when he meets twenty-year-old Una she seems responsive to his tentative advances, and he’s emboldened to pursue her. This awkward “romance” results in disasters raining down upon Dev; at the end he’s in the same situation he was in the beginning, but inside he’s shattered beyond repair. No longer will he accept his lot in life, but never again will he attempt to make intimate contact with a woman. This is a desolate, relentless, grimy book. Though Dev is someone I understood, I wasn’t moved by his emotional destruction because Moore doesn’t make him an appealing person. At Saint Michan’s School the cane rules (the scenes of beatings are appalling), and Dev wields his with gusto; he sees the boys as ugly, vicious lumps. In other ways he’s a mild man, not a bad sort. He rises up to display defiance at the end, but it’s short-lived and too late. Hanging over the characters (like a cane about to descend) is the harsh and repressive Catholicism prevailing in Belfast in the1950s. Moore condemns a society that twists people’s natures into grotesque shapes. I felt that the only response to such a place would be to violently rebel against it or to leave it (which is what the author chose to do).

Night and Silence Who Is Here? - Pamela Hansford Johnson

This novel’s lugubrious and obscure title is inappropriate and its subtitle, “An American Comedy,” is a misrepresentation. The author brings together a group of over-the-top eccentrics at a New England college. But colorful eccentrics behaving oddly aren’t funny per se, not if they have no substance nor a coherent plot to provide a basis for their actions. Things move along with a dogged joie de vivre as Johnson tries, in prose that sparkles too brightly, to make her characters cavort about, to be funny, funny, funny. Forced zaniness never works. As for Who Is Here?, I wasn’t, not for long; I made a quiet exit from a party that was turning out to be a flop.

Thurber Country - James Thurber

Early on Thurber did some excellent work, but at a point in his career everything he wrote – even if it was bad or indifferent – got published by The New Yorker, where he was employed. He got lazy – or at least I attribute the “tossed off” quality of these twenty-five pieces to laziness. Only nine had any merit. In this collection of prose his idiosyncratic drawings, in which he can capture an expression with a minimum of lines, are the high points.

Sleepless Nights - Elizabeth Hardwick
This New York Insider novel (it’s dedicated it to Mary McCarthy and has blurbs by Didion, Sontag, etc.) is an arty exercise in prose styling that’s short on substance. Though autobiographical, Hardwick remains behind a gauzy literary veil; some of the characters she interacts with are identified only by initials. The book is composed mostly of vignettes, with much circumlocution and mood and angst. I’m sure the Insiders got more out of it than I did (and knew whose initials were being used). I quit halfway through.

No One Writes to the Colonel - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)
One long story and eight short ones. The long one is the best – though it’s so dreary and dark! The shorter ones are insubstantial when standing alone, but cumulatively a town and its people emerge. Still, nothing here adds to the luster of Garcia Marquez’s reputation.

The Sun in Scorpio - Margery Sharp
An unusual novel. Cathy, at its center, is distant and sometimes unlikable. I often didn’t know what to feel about her. Why her fixation on the island paradise? What’s her problem with people? My sympathy for this integral character wavered, and thus my involvement in her story waxed and waned. Then came the ending, with Cathy at age forty, and at last I understood her, including who she was in her youth. She faces the fact that she’s led a wasted life, without loving or being loved. I was glad that Sharp gave her the opportunity to make up for that loss.

Strange Pilgrims - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Spanish)
This collection has the great “Maria dos Prazeros” and the excellent “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” (plus some other good stories), but half of the twelve are just fair to middling, formless impressionistic pieces. Which brings up the question of why Garcia Marquez included them. To get the requisite number of words for a collection?