I did not reach my goal of 21 books, but 14 wasn't bad, considering we were busier and didn't isolate as much compared to 2020.
Here's a snapshot of my on-deck books as of now. As you can see, there are still some books from 2020, though they got shuffled around, and I keep acquiring new books. A few have spilled over in the little cubby of my desk nearby.
Jesus, you can really see how misaligned the shelves are (Olman installed them).
“Folks like to talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing but it’s just hate in a nicer suit.”
--Ike Randolph
I spotted this 2021 hardcover on my MIL’s bookshelf that was in our guest room during our holiday visit. Olman had already read it when he stayed there in November, and he highly recommended it, so I chose this over the Megan Abbott book I’d brought. And besides, how often do I get to read a new release?
Olman sums it up pretty well:
The main character in Razorblade Tears is an ex-con who runs his own landscaping business. Cosby puts his knowledge to good use as yard tools and equipment feature heavily in the action. And there is a lot of action. It reminded me a lot of the Spenser books where he and Hawk have to go full commando. It's a great set-up. Ike Randolph's gay son (whom he rejected due to his own homophobia) and his husband are brutally murdered and he and the husband's white trash dad (who also has his own roughneck past) pair up to get revenge. They are a great buddy duo, both can fight and do crime and their banter is a mix of well-written repartee and heavier shit as they get to know and appreciate each other.
Indeed, Razorblade Tears was a highly readable buddy vigilante thriller that was burdened by some heavy-handed wokeness, which was expected as the plot dealt with issues of homosexuality, toxic masculinity and race relations in contemporary Virginia.
Adding a two-dimensional transgendered character as part of a plot twist was also somewhat Crying Game-y. Tangerine came across as so whipsmart she can clap back at Ike’s failings, yet she’s so gullible she’d fall completely under the charm of an older senator who’s known to be a Grade A Asshole?
Olman said the dialogue was well-written but I found it rather ham-fisted and unrealistic at times, though I did agree the plot was well-constructed and fast-paced. I wouldn’t be surprised if Razorblade Tears has already been optioned for an upcoming movie, though Denzel Washington might be getting a little too old for the lead.
Early on in Ike and Buddy’s “investigation”, they visit their deceased sons’ former workplaces. Isaiah’s coworker Amelia lays it down for them: “You both think our sexuality is something that has to be explained. It isn’t. It’s just who we are. It wasn’t Isiah being gay that caused problems between the two of you. It was how you dealt with it or didn’t deal with it that caused the problems.”
And then there's Buddy Lee, whom Olman thought was a great character. I agree too, but also felt that he was also idealized as a kind of white cipher, ie. the ignorant white trash with a heart of gold, the culturally racist character who gradually gets wokified when he joins forces with Ike and sees the world through a Black man’s eyes.
Here’s a section where their racial differences are laid down pretty thick as Buddy comments on Ike’s nice new truck, and Ike has the perfect response:
“So let me ask you this. Would you switch places with me?”
“Do I get the truck?
“Oh, you get the truck. But you also get pulled over four or five times a month because ain’t no way your Black ass can afford a nice truck like this, right? You get the truck but you get followed around in the jewelry store because you know you probably fitting to rob the place, right? You can get the truck but you gotta deal with white ladies clutching their purses when you walk down the street…”
And later in the book when Buddy is trying to justify his past behaviour:
“I ain’t trying to make no excuses, but when you grow up around people—your aunt and uncles, your grandparents, your brothers and sisters, your friends—all of them saying things that you don’t even think about being wrong or right, you don’t put that title on yourself… So you do think I’m racist.”
Ike: “I think maybe for the first time in your life you’re seeing what the world looks like for people that don’t look like you. I mean you still ignorant as hell, but you learning. But then, so am I. We both learning…”
Cosby did a good job at making these kind of exchanges sound as realistic as possible, but it still came across as wishful dialogue. For those who are already well-informed, the novel will come across as rather heavy-handed, but for non-Black popular fiction readers who aren't as up on their CRT, perhaps it may enlighten as well as entertain. Cosby also had a way of expressing strong emotions in keenly observed moments, especially when dealing with Ike’s loss for his son:
Maybe Mya was right. Maybe he didn’t deserve to grieve Isiah. It didn’t seem fair for a man to mourn someone abundantly that he had loved so miserly.
Overall, this was satisfying genre fiction - there was no holding back on action, violence, guns, bloodshed and destruction. It involved family ties, friendship, hardened criminals, redemption, vengeance, political corruption, conspiracies, child abduction, sexuality, racism and LGBTQ+ issues! All in a contemporary Southern setting. And despite some of my misgivings, SA Cosby did a very good job juggling all these facets to make very entertaining fiction.
One thing I’m glad about reading this was that it helped add one more to 2021 (finished on NYE!), as I was 99% certain The Bone Clocks was going to be my final book for the year. At least I went out with a bang with Razorblade Tears!
Inserted in My MIL’s Razorblade hardback was a clipped NYT article about author S.A. Cosby, and it makes an interesting observation: “As a Black crime writer in the rural South, Cosby is an anomaly.” It goes on to say that most well-known African-American crime writers like Chester Himes and Walter Mosley set their stories in urban environments like LA or NY. Cosby thinks one of the main reasons Black crime writers tend to avoid the South has to do with its painful and abhorrent history - genre writers just don’t want to tackle it.
By David Mitchell
Last year I tried selling some trade paperback fiction on PPG, ie. Neal Stephenson, Dawn Powell (I had two copies)... the good stuff. Surprisingly, there were no takers (did no one read during the pandemic?), so I ended up selling them to SW Welch when his store reopened. Someone on PPG responded saying 'I’m not interested but I’ll lend you my copy of The Bone Clocks, I think you’ll love it.' I guess from the 5 or 6 books I was trying to sell, she deduced that I’d like The Bone Clocks? I thanked her but did not take her up on her offer. Yet I did put The Bone Clocks on my list, knowing that David Mitchell can be a damn fine writer when he wants to be.
When I was in Abbotsford visiting my brother in September, we went downtown for lunch and walked around the area. We stopped by a pretty good used bookstore, where was where I found this copy of The Bone Clocks.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. However, it really didn’t need to be 600+ pages, even for a writer like David bloody Mitchell! I will say that I’d rather experience 666 pages of Mitchell than slog through 99 pages of TJ Klune any day!
The Bone Clocks was rather
misleading as a contemporary fantasy. The fantastical elements comprised perhaps about 18% of the novel, at best? It began conventionally enough: girl runs
away, girl meets boy, girl gets entangled with supernatural forces, girl gets
memory wiped, girl grants asylum to immortal being to reside in the back of her mind for two decades.
Then the next chapter takes place about a decade later from the POV of a new character: a university student named Hugo Lamb who harbors a double life. The fantasy elements take a back seat – of a very long touring bus. Basically, the bulk of the book is from the POV of men who knew and loved Holly Sykes. But the fantasy stuff, when they do come back, is really great. David Mitchel can write and he can do fantasy, ie. believable world-building, good backstory on the ancient beings known as Atemporals, who are basically split between two warring factions.
Having watched Doctor Sleep on Netflix recently, the “psychoteric” war between the Horologists and the Anchorites shared amazing similarities with the psychic battles portrayed in the Stephen King adaptation, so much so that I had to look it up. Doctor Sleep was published in 2013 and The Bone Clocks in 2014, so they were very close together and apparently, it was really by chance!
According to the Horologists, the Anchorites are “carnivores” because they murder and feed off children who are gifted with psychic voltage. They then ‘decant’ their souls and drink from the Black Wine and this halts the aging process, as long as they perform this sacrifice every three months. Unlike the self-serving Anchorites, the Horologists are "good" Atemporals since they allow themselves to age; when their bodies die, their souls enter the body of a child who had just died of natural causes. Unlike the Anchorites, who get to keep their bodies, their immortality is based on reincarnation. The Horologists have made it their mission to fight the Anchorites because what they do is simply wrong, if not downright evil. Regular humans are known as Bone Clocks because they can't perceive this eternal battle that's been waging around their limited perceptions of space and time. Mitchell did a good job fleshing out the individual Horologists, though the Anchorites were pretty two-dimensional, including Hugo becoming an Anchorite, which seemed rather rushed.
In Doctor Sleep, an evil gang of supernatural beings retain their longevity by feeding on the psychic abilities (aka "steam") of children. Instead of the Horologists, you have middle-aged Danny and his young charge fighting the bad guys. I found the psychic premise and warfare in Doctor Sleep quite thrilling so may read the novel some day. Same for the final “psychoteric” war in The Bone Clocks…when it finally happened at the end. The best and worst thing about The Bone Clocks is that it’s the work of David Mitchell. It’s not that Mitchell can't write a tightly structured, conventional genre novel, he just won't -- he'd consider it beneath him. So he makes what should be a tightly structured, conventional work of genre fiction into a dense, literary novel instead. It's very arrogant!
Back to the amoral, womanizing posh boy, Hugo Lamb. He eventually gets recruited by the Anchorites, but before this happens, Mitchell goes on and on about his life in great detail. When Hugo meets Holly, many pages are devoted to Hugo wooing Holly, so you'd think that their brief fling would have some significance later. Then Holly's high school crush, Dave Brubeck, comes back in first-person - now a 30-something war journalist married to Holly and saddled with an adorable toddler daughter. Dave is torn between two loves and two duties: his family and profession.
Next comes Crispin Hershey, the
most superfluous character in the entire novel. Again, Mitchell devotes countless pages to
Crispin’s life as a former Wild Child of literary fiction. There's even an unnecessary subplot where Crispin’s
revenge on a harsh critic ends up sending said critic to a South American prison for 3
years. The critic was none other
than Richard Cheeseman, an old university friend of Hugo Lamb.
You’re led to think that Crispin will have a bigger part to play in the fantasy subplot, but nothing comes of it. An editor for any other writer would’ve excised this, but because it's David Mitchell, he got to keep all these irrevelant details because he had written so much of himself into Crispin Hershey - a male writer having a midlife crisis, whose star is fading, but his wit is still as sharp as ever, etc. Most of all, Mitchell could make fun of himself in a self-referential way, like via this very meta scathing review of Hershey's latest novel:
So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?
Check, check and check for The Bone Clocks! Even though it could've easily been 200 pages shorter and a better book, would it have been a David Mitchell book? I did get a tiny thrill when I read that Crispin’s ex-wife and daughters had a “little pied-a-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood”, which I don't live far from. Those details can be fun.
What was disappointing was that nothing ever came out of Hugo’s fling with Holly. His only connection was that he was recruited by the same Anchorite who had stalked Holly as a child. Nor did Hugo’s past love for Holly alter the course of the final psychic battle in any way. He merely followed Marinus out of the Chapel of Dust, managed to escape the collapsing wreckage, became an ordinary human again, and… was never heard from again! Crispin was even worse. He simply got killed off by a seemingly random person, Soleil Moore. The only purpose that his character served was that he was another man who loved Holly in her middle age, and who witnessed Holly having a vision. At least Dave Brubeck had a daughter with Holly.
In the reader’s guide at the end, Hugo and Crispin, and to some extent, Dave Brubeck, were men who became better people because of Holly. But what did this have to do with the novel's overarching narrative or theme?
The final narrator, Marinus, was what brought everything back full circle. His chapter was the best one, not only because it explained everything, but was also the most creatively interesting because Marinus was convincing in his first life as a man and then as a young peasant girl who makes her way up in 16th c. society. Marinus appearing in the final chapter when Holly was a grandmother in post-apocalyptic Ireland was pretty cool because he was able to finally return the favour by rescuing Holly's granddaughter and adopted grandson.
In the Guardian article, Mitchell spoke about ‘delayed gratification’ and not doing what other writers were doing. The one thing I did appreciate with the ‘delayed gratification’ was that when the fantasy stuff came back in full force, it picked up the plot where it left off, made me revisit Holly’s section again, and then her encounter with Esther Little and Marinus made more sense.
The reader may have clean forgot what happened in the early chapters because several hundred pages have passed. So all the weird stuff that happened to Holly when she was a teen, it all gets explained at the end. Which was -- Holly as a child was plagued by visions and voices. Immacule Constantin stalked Holly as the next victim for her immortal cult. The doctor who treated Holly was Dr. Marinus who neutralized her psychic voltage to protect her from the cult. Immacule then kidnapped and murdered Holly’s little brother, who had actually died from hepatitis a year earlier and whose body was inhabited by a powerful Horologist.
This review “gets” The Bone Clocks and sums up what Mitchell was trying to achieve.
I mostly agree with this assessment, but still felt The Bone Clocks could’ve been a truly great fantasy book had it been structurally tighter. As a literary work, the portrayal of three very different men having been affected by one woman makes an enjoyable enough novel, but certainly not a great one either. The combination of the fantastical with the 'normal human stuff' makes it unusual and interesting, but that's about it. It was only Mitchell’s talents and humour that made the sloggy filler bits bearable, much like how I felt about Cloud Atlas.
So glad I was able to finish before flying off the CA to join my fam for the holiday.
By TJ Klune
Now that I’ve read it.. it's going in the pile to sell to SW Welch after this review is done. Even though I enjoyed THintCS well enough, I need a big dollop of darkness with my fantasy, thank you very much. The House in the Cerulean Sea was too feel- good n' cutesy for my taste, though there were touching parts that managed to pull some hardened heartstrings.
Still, the style reminded me of the first and only Harry Potter book I read, except this is an American writer simulating how English people would talk. Unassuming middle-aged case worker Linus Baker is a dedicated employee at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. One day he gets a special month long assignment from Extremely Upper Management to investigate a peculiar orphanage that may be going a bit rogue. Linus and his cat travel by train to remote Marsyus island which is guarded by an ancient sprite named Ms Chapelwhite. There, Linus gets to know the unusual magical children and their guardian, the mysterious Arthur Parnassus.
Linus Baker’s ‘real’ world has been done before. His workplace is a very Brazil-esque bureaucracy and everyone he encounters is cold and callous – his boss is a harridan, his coworkers are soulless automatons, and his neighbour Edith Clapper is an old shrew. So far, cliched and two-dimensional. The queer romance that develops later between Linus and Arthur Parnassus was the only thing that might be considered ‘daring’, yet even their romance was unrealistic, like something out of Love, Actually. Much of the narrative was conventional and safe, in the sense that everything goes down smoothly - like syrup, or treacle.
If there’s fire and brimstone, it’s in the form a young boy nicknamed Lucy, who’s one of Arthur’s charges and who happens to be the Anti-Christ. Extremely Upper Management are concerned that this boy will grow into his Satanic powers and take over the world and they want Linus to make sure that Arthur is doing his job to keep these children under control and out of sight from society. For the rest of the unusual children, there’s a female gnome, a forest sprite, a shape-shifter who can only turn into a small dog, an unnamed tentacled species who longs to be a bellhop when he grows up. Pretty cute stuff. Klune makes sure to point out that two of the characters have dark skin, lest readers think that everyone in the book is white.
There's no big conflict in the novel, and no one is truly evil. Linus has the typical character arc where he gradually comes out of his nerdy, bureaucratic shell and falls in love with the island, its inhabitants, esp. Arthur. And of course, Linus realizes that his menial job and previous life is not what it's cracked up to be. Despite his pudgy body, Linus becomes a fierce protector of the children, especially against some of the bigoted human villagers and helps save the day.
All this is perfect fodder for a Hollywood movie – a Pleasantville for magical beings (I believe there's already a HBO production in the works). Linus Baker has only known a life in monochrome until he stepped into the Technicolor world of Marsyas Island and its colourful inhabitants. This is Klune's schtick - the end of the book included a preview for his next book, which read like a screenplay for a new Ricky Gervais movie.
Thus, I made a grave mistake in not learning enough about this book before buying it - if I had, I would’ve realized it was the literary equivalent of Love, Actually - a hit everyone loved and if you criticize it in any way, you’re looked upon as a cold-hearted miser. More importantly, if I had really done my research, I would’ve learned how TJ Klune was inspired to write this book in the first place - he had read about the Sixties Scoop and my country's horrifying Residential School System that tortured and traumatized generations of indigenous children. Keep in mind, this was before the unmarked graves were discovered in May 2021. Even then, as a white male author, Klune knew he couldn’t write a fictional book without appropriating the horrors of colonized First Nations people, so his workaround was to write a glossy, charming fantasy novel about magical beings instead.
Let’s be clear, even if I hadn’t known about the Sixties Scoop connection, I felt THitCS was kept light and gently heart-string tuggy for mass appeal and, to its detriment, was safe and PC. The Golden Compass was a far superior book dealing with similar themes but with the gravitas, subtlety and courage to deal with dark, difficult subjects that was sorely lacking in Klune’s writing, which glosses over anything that could be potentially disturbing or uncomfortable.
While I was in Vancouver, I also found a used copy of The Bone Clocks, and will give this a go next – still thirsting for some contemporary fantasy with substance. So far, Mitchell's far superior writing skills is a nice change of scenery...
By Cameron McCabe
Picked this up at a new/used Toronto bookstore, Re:Reading, while visiting a friend in East Danforth back in early August. It was our first family trip since the pandemic where we travelled beyond the borders of Quebec, primarily to visit my husband’s sister and nephews who were staying in TO throughout August.
I couldn’t believe Re:Reading had a used copy of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor in decent condition. Like The Darkmasters Trilogy, The Face was one of the “100 Novels about Cinema” featured in the August 2018 issue of Sight and Sound, where I first heard of this unusual hard-boiled murder mystery.
I only started reading The Face on the train ride back home, alone, gloriously alone, while hubs and kid remained in TO for a few more days. Even though the book was fairly compact, it took me a while to finish because summer, ie. heat wave, general busy-ness. And I couldn’t quite finish it before my trip to Vancouver in mid-Sept, and because I only had a couple of chapters left, I didn’t bring it with me. So that was another two weeks of non-reading. Then I disliked how the book ended and that took another while to finally get to the end (more on that later).
The Face on the Cutting-Room
Floor was, in film terms, very meta.
There were a lot of insider references about working in film, and
editing terminology, which I appreciated.
I was cutting the last sequences of The Waning Moon when Robertson came in and sat down. He wanted to ask me something but he did not know how to start his question. He looked at my scissors and said: ‘I often wonder why you people always cut on the end of a movement instead of cutting right on the movement.’
I answered and he said something else about cutting and editing. We talked about the montage of the Russian films, about the French avant-garde, about the photography of the early Swedish silent and the sets of the German film classics. We talked about everything but the thing we wanted to talk about. He did not know how to shift the theme and I did not want to start the shifting.
I would’ve loved this book as a film student, as I'd cut my teeth cutting film on a flatbed and studied the films that the two editors were conversing about.
At first, I thought the story took place in the States since all the characters spoke in an American dialect. Even though there were obvious references about prices being in pounds, etc. It wasn’t until I read about Scotland Yard getting involved did I realize this was actually set in London, England!
The story unfolds via the first-person POV of Cameron McCabe, who’s also the ‘author’ of the book. McCabe is a supervising film editor at a London movie studio, and his boss wants him to cut out the part of a young, aspiring actress without any real reason. The problem is that the actress is one of the leads in a film about a love triangle, so this would be a near impossible task, even for a talented editor. McCabe suspects the actress had jilted the studio boss and this is his way of getting revenge. Later that day, the actress is found dead in another editor’s cutting room, and what do y’know, the room is equipped with an automatic camera that starts filming the room as soon as the door is opened. Of course, the reel goes missing and soon, Detective Inspector Smith of Scotland Yard arrives on the scene to investigate the murder. There is immediate tension between Smith and McCabe. It doesn’t help that McCabe is a smart-ass with the inspector and our ‘hero’ immediately starts his own investigation on what happened and searches for the missing film reel. The reader eventually learns that McCabe isn’t what he seems, and surprise surprise, he’s far from a reliable narrator.
The book was very clever, unusual, and even ahead of its time, making use of the ‘false document’ technique and the gimmick of narrator as ‘author’, which turns out to be a confession.
Unfortunately, the writing wasn’t always great and it really got bogged down by its self-referentialism, especially in the afterword by a side character named Mueller with two dots. Mueller was a key witness Smith used to prosecute McCabe, and he goes into agonizing detail analyzing the psyche and motivations of McCabe based on his bizarre confession. It gets all convoluted with what happened to Smith because he had used very unorthodox schemes of getting McCabe arrested, and McCabe successfully defended himself in the drawn-out courtroom section, with Smith leaving his position and eventually taking justice into his own hands.
The book made quite a splash in 1937 and was praised for its ingenuity, but then languished in obscurity for a couple of decades before it was rediscovered in the 1970’s.
The most interesting section of the book was actually at the end which featured an interview with the real author, Ernest Borneman - he was the most fascinating thing in the book! A precocious child and youth, Borneman wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor when he was 19 years old, a few years after arriving in England as a Jewish Socialist refugee fleeing Nazi Germany. Borneman had managed to deceive German authorities by posing as a Hitler Youth.
Part of the reason he wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was to improve his English. So his youth and ESL helped explain the uneven quality of writing, at least. Borneman then became a jazz critic and musicologist, eventually collaborating with Norman McLaren, which led him to work with John Grierson when he was head of the NFB, and later with Orson Welles. Then after a career in filmmaking, he became a sexologist, and a rather controversial one at that. Apparently, Borneman was as sexual as he was intellectual!
Here is one paragraph summarizing his career as a sexologist. Reading about Borneman was definitely more interesting than reading his own fiction!
By now Borneman haunted the Frankfurt railway station at night to jot down slang, the cruder the better, and began to write down children’s sex rhymes, which led in 1968 to his Lexikon der Liebe (Dictionary of Love) in two volumes, launching his last and most controversial career as a sexologist. Borneman began to publish regularly, including two more dictionaries, which culminated in the encyclopedia Sex im Volksmund, with more than a thousand synonyms for penis. Nicknamed “Pornoman Borneman” he swiftly established himself as a sex-expert with columns, radio shows, and countless TV appearances. He was living happily in rural Austria in an old farmhouse with his 10,000 books, and had been married to Eva for fifty years, but was willing to admit he was also a threesome connoisseur who had slept with two or three hundred women.
Still, I’m glad I read this unusual book, which was considered one of the best crime novels set in the movie industry. The paperback edition I have isn’t great – as it’s from the 80’s. I’d have preferred the more tasteful Picador or Green Penguin editions, or even the more lurid versions shown at the bottom. Used book finders can’t always be choosers!
By Marilynne Robinson
Once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
During the 2020 pandemic, I discovered the 1987 film, Housekeeping, as it was leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month. The premise intrigued me: eccentric aunt Sylvie arrives at a small isolated town to care for her orphaned adolescent nieces, Ruth and Lucille. But it was this IMDb user’s review that made me want to watch it in the first place:
This is a film of a rare, intimate perception that is aimed with pinpoint precision at a few unusual characters and the places they inhabit. At first its subjects seem simple, but like many people, these characters are merely shielding themselves, hesitant to reveal much of their real natures except as rare gifts in intimate moments. It must have been tremendously challenging to create and portray natural introverts like these characters… this film certainly wouldn't appeal to everyone, but it is a beautiful and evocative character study that has the courage to deal with personalities, events and emotions too obscure or inaccessible for most mainstream filmmakers. Forsyth deserves credit for having gotten this made in the first place, as well as for the eclectic perception that gave the film its many unique and worthwhile qualities.
Sure enough, I loved the film and was amazed I had never heard of it before (it’s that obscure), but then, this small film would never have been in my radar as a teen in 1987, and if it were, I wouldn't have appreciated it then. My friend Janina told me she remembered seeing a casting call when she was at PW high school, so this film was shot outside Vancouver (even though the town of Fingerbone is supposed to be in Idaho).
Since I loved the film so much, I had to read the book and requested it for my 2021 birthday. And sure enough, I loved the book, too, and I can attest that Bill Forsyth made a wonderfully faithful adaptation of a beautiful novel. It’s one thing to write a compelling narrative about introverts but translating that cinematically was also a real accomplishment. It’s become expected for a movie director to inject their auteur-ness into an adaptation but rarely do people applaud a director for subsuming his ego in service of its literary source and channeling Robinson's voice into his film.
In a way Housekeeping the film was the perfect distillation of an imperfect novel. In reading the novel, I felt that some things were portrayed a little too simplistically, like how the town of Fingerbone was divided between the conformists vs the non-conformists, or too pretentiously as in the writerly prose or biblical references. Also I was a little uncomfortable with how non-conformity was linked to mental illness and/or the inability to deal with reality. Ruth and Lucille’s mother had committed suicide and it was hinted that she may have been bipolar. Sylvie was a fascinating character, but did she have to be so maddeningly impractical? Often she seemed detached from reality, at times even hallucinatory, and yes, it was questionable whether she could provide a stable home for her nieces. I was reminded of the parents in The Glass Castle, who were so non-conformist to the point of severe neglect. And Ruth was so passive, understandably so, but her constant, quiet waiting did get mildly tiresome.
The lake still thundered and groaned, the flood waters still brimmed and simmered. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all. The wind and the water brought sounds intact from any imaginable distance. Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer.
And even when Ruth recognized how much like Sylvie she was, I had the sense that she would always be Sylvie’s shadow. Even though Lucille became more conformist, she at least made a hard and firm decision to leave the Foster house and Sylvie’s sphere of influence for a more normal home.
But the important thing for me was that I was still able to relate to so much in the novel: the jealous rage of the two sisters as they trudged home in the snow looking through the windows of other families’ homes; their feelings of abandonment, loneliness, solitude and need to belong. And the gradual bond that developed between Sylvie and Ruth.
I waited for Sylvie to say, “You’re like me.” I thought she might say, “You’re like your mother.” I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not.
I loved how there were many subtle hints that Sylvie was “an unredeemed transient” who was trying to keep house for the sake of her nieces and how her peculiar habits and preferences reveal her previous lifestyle, like sleeping in her clothes, or eating in the dark, or preparing finger foods for dinner.
I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners… Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping… Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open.
Sylvie and Ruth do redeem themselves when their bond becomes threatened by the well-meaning but harmful intervention of Fingerbone townsfolk, and they take serious, if somewhat dramatic, action.
Sylvie did not want to lose me… She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.
But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.
One main difference in the film was that it ended with Sylvie and Ruth walking on the train bridge away from Fingerbone and they disappear into the dark night, which is a very apropos cinematic ending. In reading the novel, I got a bonus ending, in a sense, with a short chapter which revealed the transient life that Sylvie and Ruth had led several years after fleeing Fingerbone.
Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was listed by the Guardian as one of the best 100 novels of all time.
