A God in Ruins

Kate Atkinson has written a delightful "companion novel" to Life After Life (my review). The 2013 Costa Award winner (formerly the Whitbread Award) was a challenging read, at least until you figured out the rhythm of things.  In comparison, A God in Ruins is child's play - or, better said, it's Atkinson doing what she does best: a rich, gothic tale of a British family.  This story is told from Ursula's sweet brother's POV, and it only has one timeline.  

There are a few little jokes re: Ursula's restarts which are rather amusing, like her saying "Life and death are completely random, that much I have learned." Her brother, Teddy, is such a great character - loving and warm and very very British.  He was a fighter pilot in WWII, and married Nancy, who you may remember from Life After Life.  They have a daughter, Viola, who is a stark contrast to her parents.  She's kind of a hippy, lives unhappily on communes and raises two children, poorly.  She's always snidely insulting her father about organic produce, etc, which, of course, he is no stranger to him, but he didn't grow up calling the food they grew in their own garden "organic".

Many parts of the book are actually super-exciting, and I had quite a few edge-of-my-seat moments, as if I was watching a wild action movie.  Her descriptions of Teddy's flight battles, near misses and a crash or two are so exciting.  Even though I've never seen the inside of one of these planes and what sounds like an impossible number of people squeezed into little cubbies here and there, it was so vivid.

Atkinson does not present the Allied soldiers as the sainted figures they are often portrayed as.  Teddy questions the indiscriminate bombing they do and grapples with what he's done in a way his few of his fellow surviving soldiers are willing to do years after the war.  "By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination."

Here are some vocabulary words I looked up which I write here for your amusement and my own edification.  Will I remember them better now?  Who knows?  Below I will write some spoilers so read on at your own risk!

sobriquet - a nickname
entente - a friendly understanding
LMF - low moral fiber, acronym used during WWII
cauled - a type of cap
coup de foudre - an unexpected event. Literally, a bolt of lightening
tenebrous - dark, shadowy
braw - Scottish slang - good or fine. Derived from "brave"
widdershins - Scottish, in a direction contrary to the sun's course, considered unlucky
cadging - British - to ask for or obtain
au fait - having a detailed knowledge of something
pulchritudinous - I always think this word is the opposite of what it really means: beauty
spivvy - British - a man who makes a living by disreputable dealings
sprog - British, child
Far Breton

I have to say, the end of A God in Ruins hit me kind of like the end of Mad Men.  I was like GODDAMNIT! and SHE DID IT! and I was furious and exhilarated all at once.  As the walls fell down around Teddy and the horrible things Viola had done righted themselves and whole characters simply vanished all I could do was read in amazed, slack-jawed awe as Atkinson pulled on a string and unravelled the whole thing. What a fucking genius, honestly. In the author's note, Atkinson writes "I like to think of A God in Ruins as one of Ursula's lives, an unwritten one. This sounds like novelist trickery, as indeed it perhaps is, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of trickery."  She goes into a little bit of a lecture about the label of fiction and people's reactions to "new" styles:  "Personally I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too. (Not, I don't think, as post-modernly self-referential as it sounds.) I get tired of hearing that a new novel is 'experimental' or it 'reinvents the form,' as if Laurence Sterne or Gertrude Stein or indeed James Joyce never wrote a word."  Later she writes "If this is a refutation of modernism or post-modernism or whatever has superseded post-modernism, then so be it."  Her defence of the style of her book feels pointed, and I'm not sure if I missed out on some literary spat or she just doesn't like being labeled.  I like what she says about all novels being fiction, and I think what she means by "they are about fiction" has something to do with creativity and creation itself. If anyone has any other thoughts, please share them!

Mislaid

I was a big fan of Nell Zink's runaway success, The Wallcreeper (my review).  I paid cold cash for a hard cover book (something I haven't done for ages) to read Mislaid right away.  It was ok.  Not great.  But also brilliant.

First I should say I think Nell Zink is such an interesting character, and I doubt I'm the only one who secretly wishes she and I could have an intense email relationship like she supposedly still has with J. Franzen whereby she tells me fantastic books I should read and somehow, I guess, she thinks I'm pretty interesting too.  And then we make jokes about how bourgeois it is to be written up in the New Yorker. (But, really, you should read the article.)

Mislaid has a lot of brilliant lines.  One thing Zink certainly excels at is effortlessly weaving in lots of Big Themes - in this case: race, higher education, wealth, The South, destiny, queer identity, expressions of knowledge and like, a million other things.  Look, I'm mildly embarrassed that I actually know very little about lit theory (I got a useless art history degree instead of a useless lit degree) so I'm merely pretty sure about this... but I think that Mislaid is mostly, if not completely, satirical.  As such, everything was wry and distant and I never felt too invested in any characters since I was seeing everything through a smirk.

A few months ago I made a hairbrained guess about what I thought this book would be about after reading the synopsis and was way off.  In Mislaid, Peggy marries Lee (both are gay) and they have 2 children.  For really no good reason, Peggy runs off with the daughter and lives with her in utter squalor for about a dozen years as two black people (They are both white. And natural blondes.)  Many absurd things happen and then the most absurd thing happens and then, ta da: everything pretty much works out ok. I suppose I might be grouchy about it if I didn't absolutely guffaw through the last 100 pages. Zink flings so many zingers there's nary a soul or institution that walks away unzung.

Something that struck me about both Zink's books is how slender and yet all-encompassing they are.  She's concise in her acerbic wit but doesn't spare words either. After a page-long description of the local dump (compared to Dante's Inferno, natch), she writes: "Mayonnaise is an irresponsible splurge when you don't have a fridge, but there are small sizes available, especially in places where people live hand to mouth and 'large economy size' is regarded as a long-term investment that would tie up needed capital."

I can't wait to read her next book.  Since she supposedly wrote both these books in a matter of weeks it might not be long.