Book Review: Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes (1926), by Sylvia Townsend Warner, is a must read for the fan of Elisabeth Gaskell, anyone who knows who Djuna Barnes is, and Agatha Christie fans who have read everything she’s written multiple times, want more, and are sick of murder but up for 1920s witches. And 1920s philosophy and politics.

It is for readers who want a more overtly feminist and less cheerful version of the Map and Lucia books by E. F. Benson.

It is also for Theodore Dreiser fans who want something less discouraging and meaningfully shorter. You don’t need to have actually read Dreiser’s American Tragedy (1925) to know it is not going to turn out well, though if you’re interested in the death penalty, it’s worth a read. The stakes in Lolly Willowes may seem significantly lower: No one is about to be executed by the state here.

Yet it is clear that Sylvia Townsend Warner recognizes the stakes as quite high. Lolly Willowes depicts the slow suffocating power of class and gender expectations. Upon her father’s death, Lolly is sucked into her brother’s family’s life in London:

• “‘Of course,’ said [sister-in-law] Caroline, ‘you will come to us’.” (1)

• “She would take the air in Hyde Park and watch the children on their ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in Rotten Row, and go to the theatre in a cab.” (4)

The dehumanizing way in which these expectations become internalized is gently chilling:

• “Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had almost forgotten her baptismal name.” (58)

• "[W]hen Laura went to London she left Laura behind, and entered into a state of Aunt Lolly. She had quitted so much of herself in quitting Somerset … shorn of her long meandering country days, sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person. Or rather, she had become two persons, each different."(61)

Though gentle, Lolly Willowes is clearly a far from subtle exploration of interpellation. The level of detail about her smart vs pompous bed is one of the delights of the book. The fact that rather than fully becoming “another person” she manages to “become two persons” indicates that Lolly Willowes, against the odds, may succeed in extricating and being (again) herself. Her affinity for wandering the hedgerows and gathering herbs as a young woman leads, eventually, to participation in a rural Witches’ Sabbath.

She meets the Devil. More, she contracts with the Devil and in so doing (re)names her self:

• “She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil.” (169)

Rows of white candles burn and melt in front of a dark background.

In between her youthful endeavors and her eventual compact with the Devil, mainstream life, as represented by London and by her roles as an unmarried woman in an established family, attempts not just to control her daily life but to lead her, occasionally through argument but largely through repetition of daily and yearly rituals, into not just becoming but accepting what it expects her to be.

Lolly Willowes is a deeply political, weirdly and subtly—even equivocally— witchy novel in which, most of the time, almost nothing seems to happen. The plot is a woman’s frustrated and often unconscious fight against internalizing the expectations her social context has of her. Lolly Willowes tries to be fundamentally optimistic about the potential of individual identity and resistance, and Warner’s perspective is delightfully presented with scene setting and a world of side characters. The description of the behavior of hedghogs, and that of a hedgehog-centric rural neighbor is, for a certain kind of reader, simply not to be missed:

• “Kind Miss Carloe, she would sit up till all hours tempting her hedgehog with bread-and-milk. Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals ; they go out for walks at night, grunting, and shoving out their black snouts.” (136)

One question here is whether this individual woman, Laura Erminia Willowes, Aunt Lolly, will be able to avoid her fate as “Aunt Lolly.” Miss Willowes’ (“Laura” doesn’t seem quite right) has triumphs. At the same time, the equivocal presentation of the novel’s own witchy escape route and the characterization style together suggest a more ambivalent or at least less straightforward view.

Book Reviews vs Memes

I have a few book reviews half-written in my head, but I don’t have time to actually write them. My brain has turned into a bad meme generator.

In this clip art and emoji-based meme, I present three emoji faces: weary, frazzled, and head on fire. I am not sure whether these are officially sanctioned emoji titles, as I am aware enough to know that most of us get many emojis wrong. If I can convince people to interpret them my way, I think I get karma on Reddit. ;-D (Old fashioned winky face with semi colon, hyphen, and capital D).

Netflix’s Persuasion makes me want to re-read Mansfield Park

In recent days, I’ve had a few friends ask whether I’m planning to watch the Netflix Persuasion. Like many of us who have read all of Jane Austen’s novels multiple times,* Persuasion is my favorite. Or at least sometimes it is my favorite. But somehow all of this talk about the latest apparently mediocre Persuasion adaptation is just making me want to re-read Mansfield Park.

Thinking about Persuasion naturally led me to reflect on Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, the other two Austen novels that seem to emerge into popular culture less frequently and favorably than the big three: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey is, for me, in a Jane Austen category of its own, but Persuasion and Mansfield Park have a thematic relationship in my personal classification system: their respective heroines Anne Elliot and Fanny Price have a lot in common.

If Pride and Prejudice is prosecco, Persuasion is a drinking chocolate: slow, warming, and dense with meaning. It is also satisfying enough to make the reading worthwhile. What then of Mansfield Park, Austen’s least sparkling novel?

It’s not even a beverage, but thick edgy sweet biting molasses. When I think Mansfield Park, I can smell suffering, and it’s an inescapable cloyingly sweet burnt and bitter miasma emanating from a morally rotten core. (Sorry, molasses.) The slave trade serves as a foundation of the wealth in the novel. As Marsha Huff’s “Sir Thomas Bertram and the Slave Trade” notes, “The first readers of the novel, published in 1814, would have assumed that Sir Thomas Bertram’s business in Antigua was a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, as were all West Indian enterprises.” Though somewhat obscured by charades and shrubberies, and by the vivacious Mary Crawford, it’s hard not to read the novel with oppression on the mind given the deep background slavery and the overtly troubling treatment of the novel’s heroine.

No wonder it is what the Jane Austen Society of North America characterizes as Austen’s “‘problem’ novel.”

Since Austen is both one of the most well-known nineteenth century “women’s fiction” authors and her novels are frequently retold in various adaptations, her heroines are some of the most widely recognized nineteenth century women. I have the sense that Fanny Price is the easiest to forget.

If Persuasion’s Anne is slow to realize her own mind, slow to claim agency, Fanny’s reluctance and inability to do so is greater. When I read that the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is understood to be off track because of the way Anne “has been given a spunky and outspoken persona absent from her character in the book” as CBR puts it, I can’t help but wonder what a Netflix adaptation in the same vein would do with Fanny. Her need for an entirely new, out-of-character re-write is far more desperate than Anne’s. If you haven’t yet read Mansfield Park or need a reminder, think of Fanny as a pathetic, more put-upon version of Pride and Prejudice's Charlotte Lucas, for whom things are bad enough that she is condemned by her place in life to willingly marry herself to perhaps the least appealing bachelor in a novel that includes the predatory villain George Wickham. At least Charlotte knows something of what she is trading for security.

Fanny is widely understood as too weak to be interesting due to such characterizations as this: “She had been quite overlooked by her cousins; and as her own opinion of her claims on Sir Thomas’s affection was much too humble to give her any idea of classing herself with his children, she was glad to remain behind and gain a little breathing-time” (Chapter XIX). She is not assertive, she does not recognize her own worth, and she does not expect attention. She is, as she puts it, “graver than other people” (Chapter XXI).

Of course she is. Nothing about Fanny’s circumstances builds her agency and everything about it conspires to make her “grave.”

Edmund, the brother with whom Fanny is in love without hope, has a suggestion about how she should ingratiate herself to her uncle. Her part in the conversation shows her to be analyzing everyone’s probable responses, hyperaware of the potential for criticism of herself: “‘Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.’ “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?’” The conversation continues and she defends herself by explaining why she did not pursue the conversation: “And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I though it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel” (Chapter XXI). Fanny’s attempt at self-defense is all the more painful because she has no appreciation of the unfairness of her situation. She understands herself to be trapped in this situation, with no way to win, but she does not recognize that she has been trapped by others whose control she cannot escape. In the context of the novel, her concerns make perfect sense. Her upbringing since age ten has been with a family determined that she should know her place and eager to scapegoat her.

Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may not be a sparkling character, but she is a survivor. Her response to this impossible situation is intriguing. Lavish appreciation on characters like the witty, energetic, Elizabeth Bennet with her well developed sense of agency, but save some love for Fanny. She deserves it.

• Note: Though I’ve read all of Austen’s novels multiple times, I haven’t read them recently enough to be confident of accuracy with regard to the details. Specific comparison is not what this is about. What I’m exploring here is my memory of the books, my memory of the adaptations I’ve seen, of a range of criticism I’ve read, and my sense of the cultural role of the books, including the way they serve as indexes of societal priorities.

Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction

I’ve been reading a lot in recent months, but I have not even been thinking about writing book reviews. Usually, when I read novels and short stories, I have a review developing in my head. I may be wrong about this, but I think of it as being a bit like a background program running on a computer.

Unusually for me, I have not been reading all that much fiction. The exception is beautiful children’s books, like Where Ocean Meets Sky by Eric Fan and Terry Fan. But that’s a post for another day. I’ve read non-fiction books from memoir to philosophy to texts for professionals in fields that are not mine. I’m gaining a lot of information. I’m synthesizing ideas and stories, studies and research.

Some of these books are better than others, but they are not exactly comparable. Taking into account their goals, I could develop evaluative criteria, or I could write about my reading experiences. I have read many book reviews of nonfiction, and they’re often quite helpful in directing my reading. I could write reviews myself. But the thought never occurs to me as I read, and when I consider the idea consciously, it holds no appeal.

What I can do, and find myself doing in a range of contexts, is recommend specific books or articles to individuals based on their questions or experiences. I can also pull key examples and pieces of information from this kind of reading and incorporate them as relevant into casual conversations. That’s very different than a book review, because what I have to say is evoked by the context. For me, reading nonfiction simply does not create a void waiting to be filled with a book review.

I titled this post “Why I don’t write book reviews for nonfiction,” but it might be more accurate to title it" “Why I read fiction part 1.” The nature of my engagement is inherently more active when I read fiction.

As much as I am curious and liable to become fascinated by all sorts of ideas and topics, the automatic book review program is not triggered except by fiction.

Book Review: Lake Life

Lake Life by David James Poissant (now out in paperback) is the kind of novel I’m always hoping to find. It can afford to be heartwarming. Such a feat seems like it should be impossible in a novel that feels so contemporary.

A thoughtful, serious hilarious tragic literary contemporary Southern novel, it is full of sympathy.

As most reviews seem to note, a family’s tangential participation in a tragedy precipitates the revelation of long held secrets and shames. When the secrets are finally escaping in a series of semi-intentional leaks, one character asks: “Did you know” and another responds, “know what…?” It’s not a play for time; it’s a completely legitimate question for character and reader alike.

When I started reading this book, I could tell things would get worse and worse, and I didn’t know if they’d get better, too. In a year of tragedy and isolation, this was a challenging read, but the incisive observations of people struggling through and doing their best kept me coming back. Are they failures, as some of them declare themselves to be? Are they unlucky? What does it mean to be a “successful” human? One answer I think Lake Life gives is that it means that you keep going and you try for a moment of unstated forgiveness, amends, attempts. If failed connection and veiled honesty means hope and love. Try to make that enough.

This is a novel of death, of strained relationships, and of a place. I can see the sunset over the lake, the once-NYC-art-world-darling’s Audubon-esque copies made for tourists, the completely tangential character’s cell-phone glowing eerily from underwater.

This is a novel with a lot of detail, and the range of the kinds of details distinguish it for me. Lake Life includes themes and a focus on characterization that often means a book will ignore the mundane and the visceral. But in Lake Life, you get information about finances:

“Not that they can afford a second opinion, what with a mortgage they can hardly handle on a house that’s worth half what they paid in 2007, four maxed-out credit cards, plus Diane’s student loans, which , no matter how hard she ignores them, aren’t exactly going anywhere.”

And you get:

“Michael’s face is sweaty, lips twisted in an unrelenting sneer. His bandage comes loose, flashing the family with the puffy, ointment-smeared stitches, before Michael fumbles with the cotton and, wincing, thumbs the bandage into place.”

Injuries, deaths, betrayals, violence, substance abuse, abuse, suicide attempts, and paintings of “gutted goats,” not to mention the careless clear-out of an adult child’s beloved comic collection, could mean tragedy. The fact that in the present of the novel, the family has gathered for what can only be a torturous and drawn-out goodbye to their beloved family lake house just heightens the sentimental potential. I’m not going to say why selling the lake house is imperative though second-guessed, except to note that the logic rings true, though it might seem far-fetched to some. I have thought of exactly the same explanation for a very similar “sell the vacation home” scenario that I have observed in real life. I won’t deny that I may tend to think of far-fetched explanations. The idiosyncrasies, the illogical logic, the interest rates and the fact that “The walls are marked by holes and hooks where paintings used to hang” keep things from being overwrought.

People go to get an ice cream in this book. They put gas in their boats. A hot shower produces steam. In that context, the restrained hope seems appropriate.

I read a lot of depressing material, so don’t trust me on this, but I found Lake Life to be a remarkably uplifting novel. Enjoy if you can, and if not, it’s still a great read.

Unfinished summer reading and the advantages of a hard copy

I once picked up a bright orange copy of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley while on vacation, having enjoyed the first couple of pages in an air conditioned bookstore. I brought it to the beach and read, drunk on heat and bightness, my head swimming. My eyes were half dazzled by the reflection from the water, even as I shaded the just-off-white pages in order to read in the glare.

As Mr. Ripley considers whether to kiss or murder Dickie Greenleaf, on a boat, the scene I imagined was permeated by the same heat and sun and rhythm in which I read, though my water was colder. I can feel the bone chill of the water in my ankles, from my eventual run into the waves.

That is one kind of quintessential summer reading experience, though I did finish this thriller immediately.

Another is my reading of a John le Carre spy nove,l the title of which I cannot remember, beside the pool. I spent a few summers at a few different pools reading the book, its cover curled and its pages bearing evidence of the splashes and the sun. In between, the book spent at least one winter in the trunk of my car, baking and freezing. My Kindle app on my phone is probably where I put in the most fiction reading time, my Kindle is sturdy, but not that sturdy. The printed book has some unbeatable features.

I have not yet finished this novel and I’m not sure who is spying on whom, though I do remember enough that I want to get back to this story, even, hopefully, this particular copy. I think it’s still in a bag with some goggles, organized not by author or genre but by the context of reading.

Many of my most memorable summer reads have never been finished, and they’re not all thrillers and spy novels. Anna Karenina and The Brother’s Karamazov both qualify as summer reading in my personal system. Who has time to read massive books like that, unassigned, while studying English and therefore having stacks of assigned texts? I started Anna Karenina one summer in high school and read over half before school started back up in the fall. I always meant to return to it, though extensive Russian novels are are rarely my top reading pursuit. Tellingly, when I decided for reasons unknown to read another one during down time at an art gallery job during grad school, I started The Brother’s Karamazov. I was almost relieved when the semester started and I could freely abandon the extensive philosophical discussions that dominate my memory of the book.

Summer reading is determined by the context of the reading experience, by the way the book promises to fill unstructured months, by how well the dazed feeling of being overheated accompanies the plot, and by whether the book can be catalogued with swim gear.

Why is reading a book only once the norm?

I used to think it was lazy of me to re-read. There’s definitely a certain kind of energy that is not required upon a second or third read.

But that energy doesn’t mean the first read is superior to subsequent reads. Making a particular cake for the first time takes more energy than subsequent bakes, and it is not generally considered a lazy waste of time to make the same cake a second, even a third time. People are celebrated for perfecting particular cakes, even.

After all, the first bake is high risk. Are all of the ingredients included in the ingredient list? No. You have to carefully read through extensive discussion about how beaten a moderately well beaten egg should be to discover that you need vanilla—and, oh, approximately 2 tablespoons of boiling water in which to dissolve the espresso powder that you have discovered is fused into a hockey puck. There you are, mid-egg-beating, attacking the hockey puck with an ice pick while boiling water and trying to get the vanilla lid unstuck.

Such are the perils of following a recipe for the first time. You learn a lot and with luck the result is enjoyable. But clearly baking that cake next time will go more smoothly, unless you wait so long you forget everything you learned the first time.

Reading a book for the first time is, likewise, fraught with peril. Some may spend their energy distracted by worries about a character they like who seems determined to make bad choices. I’m talking to you, Anita Brookner heroines. Others may read a book about family and love and despair stubbornly focused on global warming because that’s the significant lens for them at that time. I’m talking to you, theoretically-minded readers. Perhaps the likeliest distraction is simply ploughing through to the end to “find out what happens.”

Clearly a second or third read presents an opportunity for a new experience, and who is to say that it’s the first read that matters most? If re-reading is lazy, surely it is a laziness to embrace.

19th c Canadian Chick Lit

Lucy Maud Montgomery is (long)* 19th Century Canadian juvenile chick lit, and I love her.

One of the best trips of my life was a family vacation that included Prince Edward Island and its delightful Green Gables, and Lover’s Lane, and the house with the dress that Montgomery once wore, as an adult with a waist smaller than I had as a skinny high schooler. The lupines were everywhere and they were in bloom, and the potatoes were fantastic.

Like many other girls, I read Anne of Green Gables, and going to the place is a highlight of literary travel I recommend to anyone who cares for Anne with an e.

I recently read Montgomery’s Christmas Stories. I used the app Serial and read one story of baked goods and snow and boarding houses and, of course, Christmas generosity each day.

The generosity in these stories typifies the genre, and it must be unexpected. People turn out to be better than you think, at least for a day. That is a key ingredient in a nineteenth century heartwarmer, along with, I now realize, a Christmas plum cake.

*Edited to add: one day I’ll have to write about the long 19th century concept. Suffice it to say that Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908.

Current Reading at the end of 2020, a partial list

As the year comes to an end, and everyone else is posting what they have completed in 2020, I’ll share a dozen (OK, a baker’s dozen) of my current books with a few selected quotes that help explain why I read so many books at once.

1. Christmas Stories by Lucy Maud Montgomery

   Characteristic quote:

   It was the dusk of Christmas Eve and they were all in Jean Lawrence's room at No. 16 Chestnut Terrace. No. 16 was a boarding-house, and boarding-houses are not proverbially cheerful places in which to spend Christmas, but Jean's room, at least, was a pleasant spot, and all the girls had brought their Christmas presents in to show each other.
   *Note: This collection is on the app Serial and the Kindle edition on Amazon is at least similar.

2. Last Seen Wearing an Inspector Morse mystery by Colin Dexter

3. The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

4. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George

   Characteristic quote:

   A dark enormous form ran onto the meadow. No one was in sight…I had the impression that it was a deer…I ran into the grass. There lay a dead deer.…Someone was poaching.

5. New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver

   Characteristic quote:

   Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy… “Azure”

6. The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt

7. Saga, volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

8. The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun Wang

9. Murder on Youngers Creek Road by Gary P. West

10. Elsie Dinsmore by Martha Finley

    Characteristic quote:

    "Dear papa, I am so sorry I have been so naughty," she murmured, leaning her head against the arm of his chair, while the tears rolled fast down her cheeks; "won't you please forgive me, papa? it seems to me I can't go to sleep to-night if you are angry with me."

11. The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang

    Characteristic quote:

    Saina sat behind the wheel of the parked car, a hand-me-down Saab that the house’s previous owner —a widowed theater director who couldn’t take the upstate winters anymore—had left behind along with an attic full of furniture and a shed piled with buckets of unapplied weather sealant.

12. Productions of Mrs. Maria Stewart: Presented to the First African Church and Society of the City of Boston by Maria Stewart

13. Dracula by Bram Stoker

    Characteristic quote:

    Strange and terrible as it is, it is true!

I read a lot of books at once in part because I read for lots of different reasons. I might be working on a project that asks me to review a strangely popular nineteenth century children’s book (#10 above), or I might want to spend half an hour thinking about train tables and an alibi I already know to be faked (#2). I might be reading something with my kids (#3, #4).

But what if I want something else? Well, there’s a poetry collection (#5). There’s a comedic romp that is also a social commentary (#11). And so on.

Some are re-reads, and some I might not finish. I might set one aside and return to it after months or years. I haven’t read So Much Blue by Percival Everett in a sustained way in a long time, and it isn’t on the list above in part because of that, but 2021 could be the year I return to it.