A Visit from the Goon Squad

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2011. Reviewers tripping over themselves to dole out superlatives. I approached A Visit from the Goon Squad expecting to be disappointed. That's the problem with over-hyped books, even if you enjoy them they tend to leave you feeling a little underwhelmed, while the books you approach with no expectations can surprise and delight you.

But, but, for me A Visit from the Goon Squad was an unexpected delight. It quickly pierced through my 'okay, impress me' attitude. It shouldn't have worked for me - it was told from so many perspectives, there was a chapter in Powerpoint for goodness sake - but it did.  Jennifer Egan's beautiful prose sucked me in and the way she writes from so many perspectives without the novel ever feeling disjointed is impressive.  Within their limited allotted space in the novel each character is fully formed, believable and sympathetic. Even the Powerpoint chapter managed to convey character in relatively few words.

The story moves between characters and times, from the 1970s through to 2020.  A tangle of connections hold the characters and stories together, with even minor characters having their own connections. Egan makes room in the novel for both tragedy and redemption. Characters make choices that go on to shape their lives, but while for some those become the defining moments of their lives, for others there are second chances, new connections to be made or old ones to renew.

Definitely a novel that is worth all the praise that has been heaped on it.

Paris fiction

After reading The Paris Wife I felt the urge to read more about Paris as I'm nurturing a vague hope of a trip there next spring. A bit of Googling brought me a few recommendations that I ordered from the library.  The first to arrive was Left Bank by Kate Muir.  I was a bit embarrassed on collecting it from the library to discover that it was labelled 'romance' (although to be honest my library does seem to be a bit hit and miss in what it deems 'general', 'literary fiction' and 'romance'). It was a lightweight tale of love, adultery, motherhood and self-invention with the odd bit of philosophy thrown in.  It had some nice humour and descriptions of Paris, but generally not my cup of tea.

The next recommendation to arrive was The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. Published in 1958 it is loosely based on the year that Dundy spent in Paris.  A sort of coming of age novel, its protagonist, Sally Jay Gorce is funny, interesting, infuriating and complicated.  The Paris set she is part of seems very much the wannabe artistic successors of Hemingway et al. The novel is full of comic characters and ridiculous situations into which Sally Jay is invariably drawn. Underlying it are questions about how to live and how to love.  It was both funnier and more substantial than Left Bank.

The next on my Paris pile is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Everything so far has been by American or British writers, I'd like to read some Paris based novels by French writers.  Any suggestions?

How To Be a Woman

I read Caitlin Moran's How To Be a Woman for my book group. A change from our usual fiction but I think it struck a chord with all of us. Described as 'Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool', it was more of a memoir than I expected and it's no analytical feminist treatise, but it's good to read a mainstream writer taking on the big and small issues facing women in the twenty first century, happy to call herself a (strident) feminist. You don't have to agree with Moran's take on every issue - I'm not convinced that increasing the variety of pornography is going to resolve pornography's exploitation of women or that equating sexism with being impolite is necessarily helpful - to be pleased that she's writing about them.

In the book Moran lays open her life, from her teenage years to motherhood. No experience, from masturbation to abortion, seems to be too personal to be opened up for examination. The book is funny and occasionally moving. A lot of it will be instantly recognisable to most women.

How To Be a Woman has been criticised for it's lack of analysis and for focusing primarily on 'surface' issues such as body image, lap dancing and bras, rather than the underlying structural causes of gender inequality.  But that would be different book and not what Moran set out to write.  This book will be read by people who might not give more serious feminist analysis a second glance.  If it can amuse and get people thinking about some of those cultural aspects of inequality and discrimination that often get taken for granted, it will be doing something right.