Educated by Tara Westover

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It happened that I was looking for an audio book, so I scrolled down the availables at my public library resolved to choose the first thing that got my attention. “Educated” was a big deal when it came out several years ago, with both commercial and literary appeal. I even had a copy in the house that I had found on the street, but got rid of it in the Great Winnowing before my move to Seoul, and before I found the time to read it.

Tara Westover had an unusual childhood, to put it mildly, and has acquired the strength of mind and command of prose to relate the story of her growing up in a very interesting way. The story is much more about abuse and family dysfunction than I was expecting, and it made me a big believer in OSHA and child labor laws. Tara and various members of her family have numerous near-death experiences working for her father, a contractor and owner of a junkyard. She endures horrific psychological and physical abuse by an older brother, and is gaslighted about it, at the time and also later.

As she manages to escape, first by passing a test to get into Brigham Young University and (after many initial struggles to adapt to life outside her eccentric, wildly Mormon, government-avoidant family) later impressing her professors sufficiently to win a scholarship to Cambridge, where she eventually gets a Ph.D. in history. Over the course of the decade this takes, she comes to understand the toll that her family has taken on her own sense of reality, and becomes estranged from many of them, particularly her parents and some of her siblings.

Looking back a day after I finished it, my overwhelming impression is that though it was well-written and engaging, and though I am happy for Tara on her escape from a narrow and constricted life, I think I could have spent my time better than reading this book. Horrific memoirs of abuse always feel faintly voyeuristic to me, and I should have realized that this is what “Educated” would be.

Also, and it sounds mean to say this, but this is the sort of book taste-making coastal elites love because it confirms their prejudices about religious people in the heartland in an gratifying way — there’s abuse, but also a happy ending. Among many more ordinary readers there seems to be a strong love for memoirs of dysfunction and abuse — what else can explain the mysterious success of “Angela’s Ashes,” for example?

I think I need to read some more Barbara Pym. The world is too much with me.

The Red House Mystery

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A strange melange of Agatha Christie (fiendishly ingenious country house murder), Sherlock Holmes (amateur sleuths, bromance) and Winnie the Pooh (a delight in verbal repetition, low-stakes madcap adventure), this book was ridiculous yet delightful.

A. A. Milne published it, his only murder mystery, in 1922, a few years before he hit it big in the children’s book world. I did not realize when I was listening to it that the murder mystery came first, and I kept being struck by how much the dynamic of Anthony Gillingham (the Sherlock figure) and Bill Beverly (the Watson) reminded me of Christopher Robin and Pooh.

Also the extent to which it is a world almost entirely without women, and all the ways in which it seems a world apart from the difficulties of real life. An idyll, a romp, Arcadia, despite the presence of a murder victim.

‘Less’ Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

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I “read” LESS as an audiobook, which may have affected how it worked on me. Though a short book, it took weeks to get through, chiefly because of all the limits when I allow myself to listen to an audiobook. (Mostly I listen in the gym — but then I got Covid and stopped going to the gym. On walks — but only when alone, because otherwise it’s antisocial. Not in bed at night, because I fall asleep and miss things. Not on my commute, because I am unreasonably afraid of an earbud falling out of my ear and into some irretrievable place. Etc.) So I kept putting it aside for days at a time and then returning to it, yet somehow never lost the thread. This might be in part because of its episodic nature, as I discuss more below.

LESS is laugh-out-loud-with-an-undignified-snort funny in places. (I had to suppress this impulse in the gym.) It is also lyrical. Andrew Sean Greer has a master touch with unexpected metaphors and similes, with descriptions that pierce your heart with their rightness. He writes well about love and longing and nostalgia. But anyone who writes about such topics, however well, risks descending into self-indulgent bathos, into sweet sentimentality. The humor is the lemon juice or the lemon zest that is supposed to keep this from happening. Did this work? Mostly, it did.

The structure is fairly simple, as the chapter headings make clear (Less at First, Less Mexican, etc). Arthur Less, in order to escape the wedding of the man he has (too late) realized he truly loved to another man, is traveling around the world courtesy of a series of decreasingly probable writerly events. (He’s a novelist, whose latest novel has been rejected by his publisher.) Everywhere he goes, disaster threatens but never quite strikes. It is not so much the rising action of a conventional novel as a picaresque — a series of episodes, rather than one thing leading to another. Although it is true that certain motifs recur, which does offer a sense of things being completed. The journey is mostly into himself, into the reality of getting older as a once-beautiful young man, facing age and time and the specter of death.

This book got a lot of prizes and acclaim and presumably sales. I always cheer when a book that dares to be funny instead of tragic manages that.

What’s Bred in the Bone: An Apology

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Yesterday I found my review of WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE had vanished from Goodreads. I immediately suspected it had been censored because of my choosing an impolite label for this book.

Today, though, it is back. I must therefore blame Goodreads’ squirrelly platform instead. But I am not sure. So I am posting what I wrote about this book, back in September 2023, because though it was not particularly brilliant, I want to remember what I said. Also, I think this book deserves to be better known.

Without further ado, I bring you WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE by Allen Grant.

The first book in a long while that prompted me to add another tag (“batshit crazy”). I look forward to enlarging this shelf.

A friend recommended this book to me years ago; I downloaded it to my Kindle and forgot about it. In a dry spell of online book loans from the library, I happened across this one and decided to give it a try. So glad I did!

I will quote briefly from her blog (The Secret Victorianist) which sums it up better than I can hope to:

“If you’re after a novel with identical twin heroes who get toothache simultaneously, a heroine who struggles to overcome an overwhelming desire to dance with snakes (or feather boas), murder, illegitimacy and a rather morally dubious spell of diamond-hunting in South Africa, then this one’s definitely for you.”

How can a novel more than a century old, with so many ridiculous elements, be so much fun to read? I think it is the entertaining writing style, which keeps the absurd plot humming along.

The premise implied in the title, that genes powerfully affect character, is a potentially troubling and implicitly racist one, but this is never allowed to become an overwhelming theme — it just lingers in the background. A young women inherits a love of dancing with snakes from an (exotic, never made entirely clear exactly from where) ancestor, but in sturdy English fashion resists this, and triumphs over it. As one does. The natives of South Africa are depicted as savage, and some of the descriptions are cringe, yet it could be much worse for something written in this era. The author displays a certain sympathy for them that I was not expecting.

Small Things Like These: A Small Review

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Twenty-four days into 2024, I’m renewing my resolution to post a brief review here of everything I read, instead of just posting on Goodreads.

Because, first, why should I work for Goodreads for free, when I can instead work for myself for free here on WordPress?

Second, my reviews seem to be vanishing off Goodreads. I definitely wrote down some thoughts about Grant Allen’s “What’s Bred in the Bone,” the most insane book I read in 2023, and now my review is gone! Vanished down the memory hole as if it never existed. I don’t think I had deep thoughts about it, but now I might as well now have had none. (Was it possibly the label “batshit crazy” that earned its erasure? I will never know. Goodreads does not explain. Goodreads does not apologize.)

But here, without further ado, Small Things Like These:

Wow. Holy mother of god. This book.

On my third book by her, I should be used to Claire Keegan by now and the things she can do with fiction, but “Small Things Like These” has knocked me sideways. It’s a very short novel and I listened to it on a weekend day. When it ended, I could not stop thinking about it.

Once I understood the basic problem that the story was setting forth, I could not imagine it how would end. But once I got to the end, I understood perfectly what would happen next. Like that of “Foster,” the ending “Small Things Like These” has a way of propelling the narrative, as if you as the reader are continuing the story in your head, participating in the work of the writer.

The problem the story sets forth is this: A man — Bill Furlong, a basically normal, decent man, with a personal history that has conditioned him to be sympathetic to outsiders and those down on their luck even though he himself, through hard work and self-discipline, has constructed a comfortable life — sees something he should not have seen, a vision of cruelty that causes him extreme discomfort.

Everything practical and sensible, every spoken and unspoken social pressure, is telling him to sweep it under the rug and pretend he never saw this thing. To ignore it would be the easiest thing in the world; no shame would attach, except that he attached by himself. And yet. And yet.

A universal story, you might say, and it is, but Keegan cleverly constructs it out of specific particulars, a carefully chosen time and place. It’s mid-1980s Ireland, a small town. It’s Christmastime, and it’s cold. We all know about the Magdalene laundries by now, but this is a few years before all the horrifying details would come out; the last years when small-town Ireland was effectively ruled by an informal yet powerful theocracy of the priests and nuns of the Catholic Church. Keegan makes it clear how people in the town sort of knew but sort of didn’t want to know what might or might not be going on in the convent, and how the women who worked there came to be there.

Furlong, whose business is supplying heating fuel like coal, wood and turf, goes to the convent to make a coal delivery, early on a Sunday morning because he’s so overbooked, not a time he would normally be expected. When he opens the coalshed door, he makes an unexpected discovery: a girl has been left there.

What’s so interesting and powerful about this book is the way it is rooted in particulars, yet it also has an almost mythic dimension. The way Furlong’s own childhood is something of a fairytale; minor characters who assume, ever so lightly, allegorical shapes. The use of snow, and cold, and Christmas. There is not one detail out of place, and even the evil nuns are sketched with a certain sympathy. For the Christians among us, it is one of those books that raises uncomfortable questions about what being a Christian actually means.

The Aspern Papers

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My feelings about Henry James are mixed, and reading “The Aspern Papers” made me remember why. It’s everything I love about Henry James and everything that I can’t love about him, in one short book.

The story is fairly simple. A man — a writer, a critic, and devotee of a certain long-dead poet named Aspern — comes to suspect that a long-ago love interest of the long-dead poet (who died young), now very old and living in a small, isolated way in Venice, is in possession of papers that would change the face of Aspern scholarship. She has already forcefully rejected people who have reached out to her seeking said documents. So the narrator decides to try to become a boarder in her home, a much too large, decaying Venetian palace.

Rather to his surprise, this gambit works: for an outrageous rent, he’s in. Then nothing happens for a long time; the old lady is not very sociable, nor is her middle-aged niece, also living in the home. So he decides to try to win over the niece, and in this way somehow get to the aunt….

Read more: The Aspern Papers

Sometimes James really funny. But I often get the sense of being not quite in on the joke. His narrators are snobbish, pretentious, and often seem hardly to know themselves. It’s both fun and disconcerting, this sense of James the author peeking out, barely visible from behind the mask of the narrators that surely represent some aspects of the author himself — but which aspects? And how much?

He had to know himself pretty well to be able to write like he did, I think. And yet. There’s something he’s not saying. And when you get to the end of “The Aspern Papers,” it’s pretty clear, at least to the modern reader, what this something is.

The longer James went on writing, the less readable I find him. (I loved “Portrait of a Lady” but I confess to giving up on both “The Golden Bowl” and “The Wings of the Dove” because I could not find my way through the morass of the words enough to understand what was happening. And probably to some people, that means I have forfeited all rights to have any opinions about James, at least any well-informed ones) “The Aspern Papers” is still relatively early Henry James, though, and the story hums along nicely, not too bogged down by sentences one gets lost in. The atmosphere of Venice more than a century ago is wonderfully rendered, and it’s fun to imagine that beautiful city before mass tourism made it into a ghost of itself.

What happens with the aunt, the niece and the papers is both comic and tragic, both inevitable and surprising. Is it as obvious to everyone else as it seemed to me that James was gay (as he did not feel free to be open about, unsurprisingly) and spent much of his fiction trying NOT to write about this fact?

Not that I mean, heaven forfend, to reduce him to his sexual preference, or to try to suggest that this explains everything about his writing in general, or “The Aspern Papers” in particular. People are complicated; Henry James certainly was!

It’s just, once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

Having read “My Search for Warren Harding” not much earlier definitely enhanced my appreciation of “The Aspern Papers”; the two novels are in dialogue with each other in such an interesting way that I think people should always be encouraged to read them together.