All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Emma Straub has a hint of Ann Tyler about her – although I always think it’s rude when people compare one creative to another, Emma Straub is a brilliant writer in her own capacity and not some copycat. But, what I’m saying is that if you like Ann Tyler you will love Emma Straub. And if you don’t, you won’t. The book’s plot doesn’t madly need explaining, it’s a modern family/domestic drama, interweaving many characters and plots so deftly – she makes it look so easy, makes it all feel so believable. It collapses slightly in the last quarter, and I feel like she missed a trick in nailing down how truly toxic sibling relationships can occasionally be, but it’s worth it for the first 3/4.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King
This is another one of those books, the sort I have talked about before, that you don’t feel has been focus-grouped to death. It tells the story of a 31 year-old writer, who is crushed by the failure to sell her novel and then battered around the head by the death of her mother and then sucker-punched by huge amounts of debt, as she struggles her way out of this malaise. It’s really good, it motors along despite not having terribly much of a plot and I laughed hard, out loud, at least twice. I think it’s very important, even in downbeat books, to have a bit of humour. The fairytale ending would have been nauseating had you not been witness to all the previous struggle.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
This is the story of two girl twins, brought up in the (must be, surely) fictional town of Mallard, USA, which was founded by a man who was technically black but so light-skinned as to pass-ish for white and the town is for these extraordinary technically black but so light as to pass-ish for white people. The twins grow up, get fed up with all this and one goes and finds the most black man she can, while the other one sets off to live her life as a white woman.
Where this book fell to bits for me was when we meet Juno, the child of one of these black/white twins, who is very dark (the book makes a massive thing about how black this child is, calling her “blue black” and “so black she was almost purple”: this is not me being weird).
She becomes a track star in order to also get the hell out of Mallard, goes to UCLA and then falls in love with a transsexual and starts hanging out with a lot of kindly drag queens. Then there is a huge coincidence and, my friends, that was the point where I could no longer suspend my disbelief. I just didn’t believe it anymore.
I’ve plotted novels, (and then never written them), and I know how it goes and suddenly amongst all the boob-binding of the transsexual and the kindly drag queens the book’s facade fell away and I saw in my mind’s eye the author in a meeting saying: “And then she goes to a party, and…” “Well that’s because she wants to pay for her boyfriend’s surgery you see, so…”
And the terrible truth is that once that fragile willingness on the part of the reader to go along with all this diverting nonsense has vanished, it’s really tricky to get it back.
But don’t mind me, I’m surely just annoyed none of my plots ever amounted to anything. It’s still a good book.
Honestly they do sound bloody tedious, the lot of them. I know fiction must move on and all that, but most of it bores me to sobs. It’s August and I’d rather read some Harry Potter fan fiction or filthy old Jilly Cooper novels, honestly.
Sorry, I know that sounds horribly grumpy – I was aiming for droll and snarky…
Thanks Esther I so need some book recommendations. The first two you suggest sound good… Perfect timing
Have you read Rodham? It has moments of being a bit silly but overall I was gripped.
All my friends have been reading like crazy during lockdown and I have just cared for my three children…
I loved The Vanishing Half, albeit with a slight roll of eyes at the “coincidence” plot line. For me it was all about identity & so I thought the issues around gender & race worked well together.
I can’t stop reading during lockdown, but I just started The Wall & have slight reservations about a dystopian novel in 2020…
Interesting review of The Vanishing Half. I had only seen untrammelled love for it. I read her other book The Mothers and thought that was good but that had elements that pulled me out of the story. I was quite interested in the other two as well but have The Most Fun We Ever Had to read first, and it sounds like quite a similar fish (is that an expression?) A lot of writers are compared to Anne Tyler when they write about the domestic sphere but very few have the ability that Tyler does to jolt you with these perfect sentences where it all suddenly comes together and means something, and you feel as if your own dull existence might mean something too. But then you have to get the dinner on and forget about it again. Her latest, The Redhead at the Side of the Road, was a very quick read and funny and seemingly quite slight, but again there was a moment near the end where she pulls back the curtain and – she just knows what she’s doing and I don’t always feel that way about a writer. It’s like even your least favourite Beatles song was still written by the Beatles. I have just read The Second Sleep by Robert Harris, which is pertinently apocalypsey. Not his finest, but another safe pair of hands and quite readable as usual. Also, I’m nearing the finish of The Mirror and the Light. I know Mantel isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – I’ve spoken to many who could not get on with Wolf Hall and left it at that – but for me these three books have been a genuinely brilliant reading experience and I will be sorry when it’s over. They are so rich and allusive and witty and bloody. Page after page she rattles off; political intrigue, personal potshots, sex, lies, decapitation and what they had for dinner, whole conversations reproduced as though she was listening behind the door. Which is easier to believe sometimes than that she just…made them up. I’m also reading Negative Capability which you recommended before, and it’s great.
For all Mantel-lovers like Cindy, I recommend Dorothy Dunnett. Two long series; the Lymond books, set mostly in Scotland, and the Niccolò books which start in Europe and range across most of the early Modern world. Completely gripping, as above covering politics, personal lives, skulduggery, money, sex – all there. She wrote the v last Niccolò just before she died and it feels a tiny bit unsatisfactory, just to warn you, but despite that worth it for the complete immersion in the previous novels.
Game of Kings is the first Lymond, Niccolò Rising the first Niccolò, both in pb at Waterstones. Enjoy.
I am not familiar with these and have a terrible compulsion to make some sort of “who Dunnett?” joke so, that out of the way, I will look out for them, thanks for the recommendation Sophie.
Ooh brilliant- I need some recommendations, I’m on book 22 of Hamish Macbeth which has been very soothing the past few months (MC Beaton really is the macaroni cheese of authors) but now I need proper books again.
I loved Negative Capability, how can everyday life be so fascinating and touching. She mentions Dorothy Richardson and Pointing Roofs in it and so I am now reading and enjoyinh that and yesterday bought…. Demi Moores autobiography.
Just finished The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig and am having a lovely daydream about living back in the West Country with a big, strong, practical, kind man who reads a lot and cooks middle-eastern food for me. I’m so incredibly simple minded.
Passing by Nella Larsen has a similar premise to The Vanishing Half but was written back in the 1920s, she was part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Yes – there is a good episode of the Backlisted podcast on Passing from a while ago. It had Sarah Churchwell who is formidable on American Literature and history and always worth listening to.
I’ve just read On Chapel Sands, which neatly ties in with your HORROR OF LOSING THE KIDS ON THE BEACH but then goes into a deep, psychological analysis of the author’s mother’s childhood. It’s non-fiction, but lyrical and mysterious. I read it in three hours, I loved it.
Mmmm… The comparison with Anne Tyler has reeled me in. She is hands down THE best writer of the (horrible description) “domestic sphere” ever. She’s a little bit sly with her readers… A little bit Austen too. Anyway I’m definitely going to give Emma Straub a go.
On the subject of Rodham I was disappointed. Trump’s hilarious appearance in the last third saved the book.
I thought Rodham was insanely dull. If Sittenfeld was creating an alternate life for Hilary, why not make her a stripper or a frustrated stay at home hockey mom? Why make her an EVEN MORE BORING version of what she was before