What I’m Reading: Lippman and Lively

Dec 222013
 

Read in August 2013

And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman

Two stars

I didn’t believe this book for a minute. If a hooker is smart enough to arrange it so the pimp she fears goes to prison for life and never learns that she has given birth to his son, how can she be stupid enough to stay in the same town, with the same name, and fork over to him half the income from the high-priced call girl escort service that she sets up? If a writer of realistic fiction decides to center her story in the world of prostitution, how can she fail to depict the sex, danger, and violence of that world? Lippman has sanitized the world of her novel, centered her plot on an unpersuasive conflict, and created a main character who simply doesn’t add up.

Consequences, by Penelope Lively

Three stars

Penelope Lively’s Consequences is a lovely little book about three generations of English women. The story begins in 1935 with Lorna Bradley, continues in the postwar years with her daughter Molly, and ends in contemporary London with her granddaughter Ruth. Each of these fully-realized women inhabits an evocatively-depicted England, showcasing the extraordinary changes in the private lives of individuals and public lives of nations in the second half of the 20th century. It’s all here: war and peace, life and death, but especially love and romance. Not that Lively is a romance writer — far from it — but she is the rare literary writer who writes believably about romance. She can say more in fewer words than any writer I know, but however spare, her work is rich, rich stuff.

What I’m Reading: Wolitzer and Weldon

Dec 222013
 

Read in August 2013

Habits of the House, by Fay Weldon

Two stars

Once upon a time, I read everything Fay Weldon published. Her Letters to Alice Upon First Reading Jane Austen should be required reading for every bookish tween girl. Some years ago for reasons unknown I lost track of her career, so I was delighted to find Habits of the House, the first installment of a trilogy about the world Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey, of course, is a television show, and Weldon’s latest is less a novel than a novelization of an idea for a TV show: a prequel to Downton Abbey. No, her characters are not exactly the Downton Abbey characters, but they might as well be: the rich American heiress and her vulgar title-shopping mother, the hapless heir in need of a rich wife, the snooty countess who comes round in the end. Unfortunately, this novel lacks the charm of the PBS series with to many bits of broad wink-wink nudge-nudge humor and too little nuance or subtlety in plot or characters. Without question, Weldon does evoke the places, manners, and mores of the world of Downton Abbey, but neither the people in her novel nor their problems measure up to the original TV show.

An Available Man, by Hilma Wolitzer

Two stars

I really loved the first half of this novel, which tells the story of Edward, a 62-year-old widower, who finds himself beset by family, friends, and strangers eager to pair him up with a new woman. His children place a personal ad on his behalf, his friends pair him with unattached women at dinner parties, and women who are complete strangers call him up, looking for dates. Although he’s still grieving for his dead wife, Edward allows himself to be wooed and eventually begins to enjoy dating. That’s the first part of the novel. SPOILER ALERT. The novel kind of goes off the rails in the second half, when one of the women who respond to the personal ad turns out to be the long-lost love who left Edward literally at the altar many years before. I simply could not believe that he would forgive and forget and plunge into an affair with the woman. Apparently, neither could he because — wham! — Edward drops her, declares his love for a completely different woman who hasn’t played much role in the story, and the novel quickly and clumsily ends, which left me thinking, “Huh?!?”

 

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