It's tribal

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6974785-the-children">The Children by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/342188.Charlotte_Wood">Charlotte Wood
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/241291991">4 of 5 stars

Last night at my women's group we talked about the impact of being in a tribe - in my case a large and close family. We talked about the sense of security it gives you. There is a layer of confidence that you have in going out to meet the world, beacuse your tribe is strong, you are loved, there are people that will care for you and opportunities for intimacy. It provides a kind of resilient backbone.

The Children is about siblings in a family. It might not be very interesting if it was about a tribe as secure as mine is. This tribe is a little dysfunctional - brought together after an accident and forced to spend unaccustomed time togther. As well as the depiction of these relationships, the novel presents a very fine and accurate picture of life in a NSW country town. It thrusts life in this small town up against the experiences of one of the main characters, Mandy, who has become a foreign correspondent and lived through some extremely traumatic events. Small towns can produce their own forms of trauma hoever, and these play out subtly in the novel. There is one faintly jarring plot line that runs through the novel unnecessarily but the rest of it was just fine and a pleasure to read.

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The post 'Marriage Plot' world

I read this novel because of an article I read about the writer and this novel titled 'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’'. I really liked the article and thought the book sounded good.
The article quotes from the actual text of the book:

"In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter who Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean anything anymore, and neither did the novel."

Who wouldn't want to read a book playing around with what was possible in a post-marriage plot world? It's set largely in about 1982 in north eastern America and it's about a triangle relationship - Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. Because I was young then (1982) and just out of uni, the novel draws in aspects of my cultural world - vey nostalgically appealing. It might not work so well with another demographic. As I drew towards the end, I was intrigued to think about how Eugenides would end it - it seemed to me to be VERY difficult to find a satisfying end - but he really manages this part well. I loved reading about the advent of post-structuralism and the impact it made at this time. He also writes well about manic depression. It's made me want to read more of his books.

Tony, Susan, Arnold, Edward and Jill

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think this is a three and a half starred book. Interesting, but it falls away in the last third. What I did like about it is that this is a book about the porous boundaries of reading. Susan receives an unpublished book in the mail from her first husband, Edward - whom she hasn't seen in 20 years (his second wife sends her an Xmas card each year). Susan had an affair with the man who became her second husband. Things ended badly between Susan and Edward. Things aren't so great with her new husband Arnold, who is away at a conference.

As the reader, we experience Susan reading Edward's narrative - which is a thriller, along with her thoughts about their relationship, her thoughts about her current marriage, and the impending arrival of Edward in her home town. So there's layers on layers here - which is what makes the book interesting. I was reading, being consious of my own life, my readerly reactions, Susan's life, and then the very lively plot within a plot. As the Guardian reviewer says: "Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there." He also said "if Tony & Susan can be said to be about anything other than its exploration of form, it is about the failure to be an agent in your own life."

This review also provides a description of the author, now deceased "He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: "You. Are. Invented." "

The book went out of print but was resuscitated by a publisher who thought it had been neglected. It has been billed as "the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road" but it's not in the same league as Revolutionary Road in my view. You might be interested in this less than complimentary view of Tony & Susan - in which the reviewer reveals the worst sentence in the book - a funny sentence about Arnold's penis and the trouble it causes.

I liked the layered stories and the sense of anxiety the writer creates as we wait for Susan's current husband to return home, for resolution of the internal story which has a kidnap and revenge as its focus and whether Edward will step beyond his writing into Susan's story. Is his narrative a form of revenge?



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An encounter with my younger self

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