If I ever attempt to write another novel about my father, this is where it will begin.
Very satisfying that the writer gets to end, if not his novel, then at least this story with an anecdote that doesn't dwell on his father's handicap. And it's not really an end, either!
Outside, we walked on the track where, cane in hand, my father had learned to run again.
The fact the writer had earlier framed this place as a "jail" makes me wonder more about his views of disability-accommodating facilities, and if he's going to eventually highlight some catch to what actually seems to me quite a nice place.
He, like my mother, was blind.
I appreciate how concise the writer is with his sentences. In this first paragraph, each one is doing double the work, so by the end, we know everything we need to know in exposition.
These towns like Seminole are havens for young sociopaths who, before they’re finally sent to prison, occupy a sizable place in the county’s mythology. They’re the guys you avoid making eye contact with when you pass them on the road. If they show up at parties, people begin to whisper and pull their car keys from the pockets.
This sums up the story in its entirety quite well. Milieu and character-centered.
It's the egg that my father fertilized and that gave birth to me.
Again, the writer can't quite stop objectifying women and using them as metaphors for the city, for the art---even his own mother. (His mother, not just "the egg!") I do, however, enjoy that he's finally found a sense of satisfaction with his achievements, which are in reality very respectable.
There was no Greta, or there were dozens of Gretas, each as insubstantial as photographs in someone else's album, one for every address where I'd lived and for every woman I had loved and ought to have been faithful to. But I was never faithful. I was too circumspect, too terrified of anything binding, to be faithful. By choosing not to choose, I expunged all choices.
It makes me a little uncomfortable how the narrator's relationships with women (and relationship TO women) are so analogous to his relationship with art. All the named, important, described artists are men but the women are simply "mostly actresses and dancers," a series of divorced wives and girlfriends, a "dozens of [insubstantial] Gretas." A deeper reading reveals a problematic association of both femininity and art as something to conquer, something to glorify.
I told the owners that I was a Pratt student, but that failed to satisfy them. I had to show them some sketches before they hired me as a dishwasher.
This is hilarious and so New York.
The sidewalks were crowded, yet somehow to me the people weren't real.
I love this retrospective acknowledgement of the narrator's childlike wonder, and knowing the structure of the story makes me almost certain that there will come a moment that juxtaposes it later on.
The evening smells somehow sweetly of the summer warmth cut by a tinge of thick, lingering exhaust, despite what the Parisian authorities claim to be their cleaning up of the city's air—a good smell, nevertheless, because it is the smell of Paris and always pleasant.
Maybe I only say this from the privileged position of having also visited Paris, but Paris does NOT smell "always pleasant." The writer is interested in literature about the meditative aspect of walking and the tantalizing rumination on place and setting---but he has not yet engaged with the long history of literature that purposefully paints Paris as a purely romantic place. I find it ironic that the writer can be so observant of the city and all its nooks and crannies and still be so distracted by its fantastical grandeur, the city of lights, city of love, yada yada, to write about the less-pleasant parts. OR---to not at least write about other writers who have represented Paris from that meditative perspective?
I'm not saying that Paris ISN'T an attractive and deeply influential location out of all the world's locations. Of course it is. It's Paris. I'm just unconvinced by (and, frankly, a little tired of) la vie en rose.
and a little spookily for me)
I feel like this wouldn't be just a "little" spooky, but maybe I'm superstitious! Too coincidental.
There was his filling me in on my questions about his condition: if he was getting nourishment (he had lost the ability to swallow, was fed through a stomach tube); and how he was being treated (the wife of a French writer acquaintance of mine was a nurse, and she told me that L'Hôpital Fernand-Widal was top-notch, with my Algerian friend himself now assuring me that the nurses were good, the doctor who was in charge of his case was especially good—also, several of the staff were Algerian, so he felt very comfortable with them); and if his therapy was going well (unlike the stockpiling of patients out in the bleak Texas flatland, here he was given a full morning of vigorous therapy every weekday, a real regimen where progress was monitored and assessed regularly).
Yeah, these repetitive endless sentences are becoming annoying. Their frequent segmentation distracts me from their overall structures and ideas, destabilizing my general understanding of what's being conveyed, AND by extension frustrating my understanding of how much ATTENTION the writer wants me to give to what's being conveyed. This effect is made worse by knowing how much "time" these meanderings take away from the overarching narrative the writer introduces from the very beginning: his sadness.
In short, I wish the writer varied his sentence structuring a bit more. If this frustration I'm feeling isn't intentional or thematically related to the story's conclusion, I'm going to walk away disappointed.
"But don't worry about that souvenir, man," I assured him again; "it's pretty much worthless."
The extra emphasis on the narrator's feelings about the souvenir, plus his diminishment of the seventeen year-old's fascination (and by extension the experiences of the young tourist peddlers) leads me to believe that the writer is going to come to some personal and perhaps moral realization about this later. Perhaps related to his "sadnesses."
overlooking the handsome Porte Saint-Martin ceremonial arch built by Louis XIV, it had a full four bedrooms.
One thing I'm not sure I love about this writer is his addiction to beginning sentences with subordinate clauses. Really stands out as a clunky attempt to diversify his language, especially as he's simultaneously feeding the reader these long sentences.
All of which I'll get to in a bit, but first maybe at least some filling-in is needed concerning my sadnesses that summer of 2011.
I love that the writer is both able to speak colloquially to the reader---because it really reads like speaking, does it?---and also display his cultural knowledge capital. The tone works to defy what some readers might expect to come off as pretension.
what I could say to them about the sea rolling in waves of pure lemon to curve and swell upon the beach. I might say that at night the peaks climbing as high as church towers slowly ate away the ground where we stood.
The narrator resolves to carry on the literary-adjacent legacy of the family.
beginning with why the tax assessor's position should exist) and ending with the word "please"
Go off Grandpa
"I'm not surprised that he's writing a book, your grandfather," Mrs. Hayes said. "He's always seemed like a writer to me."
Implies Mrs. Hayes didn't actually know all along; the writer spread the news, just as Grandpa intended for him to.
Grandma almost choked,
I love Grandma
I began to imagine the story the writer would tell about us. No heroes, battles, murders, discoveries, shipwrecks—all of that would be in the background.
I take back what I said earlier; so the narrator is lucid enough to both distinguish the "now" of the family from their adventurous past and hypothesize that the writer would think to represent the family as is. I also like how these references to the grandfather's "scheme" and the writer's ongoing work are subtle at first but slowly increasing.
I felt as if the story of our lives came to a halt until we returned to the island.
The narrator clearly appreciates his family's history and is inspired by his grandfather, though his naivete sets him apart as a more neutral narrator to the situation: Grandpa entrancing "the writer" in the hopes of a learned someone else finally appreciating the family while Grandma quietly and comically disapproves.
I could see the stories about our lives forming in the writer's head.
The grandfather wants the writer to immortalize the Howlands because he never achieved greatness as a writer himself and lost most of his family's history to the "carpetbaggers."
"We do, don't we?" my grandfather said and nodded at me. My cue to talk about the merits of "the stove," its origins, its place in stove history:
Seems routine, as if this family teases the stove with every visiting writer they host in order to inspire greatness or cultivate intrigue to keep people applying for their program, given their financial state. I'd bet that Grandpa is the mastermind behind the whole thing, and of course, we now have to wonder if it's actually John Updike's stove. Perhaps it would sound too flashy and unbelievable if the Howlands mentioned---advertised---the stove to visiting writers from the beginning.
"Ahh," he said, "that book." The writer scratched his chin. I could sense his eyes narrowing behind the lenses of his glasses. "John what?" he said eventually. "What's your last name?
Are we supposed to be wondering if the narrator's first name is significant here? Perhaps he was named after Updike, which would imply Updike had a memorable effect on this family.
Through the dark glass of his Ray-Ban Aviators, he looked at me sitting on my swivel chair behind my desk complete with various cubbyholes for international, certified, and return service forms, as well as a number of rubber stamps I longed to use in an official capacity.
The author is really emphasizing setting and description here. "He looked at me on my swivel chair behind my desk complete with..." Reads as a little shoe-horny to me, and makes me wonder if this description could have been worked in somewhere else.
She had found him scratching at the door, lonely and scared, and she had let him in.
Finally, we see a spark of heroism from Mimi, ending on an action that characterizes her a little more from a sympathetic angle even though it's clear she wants to worry Jean on purpose. Because who would leave their dog tied to a pole in the middle of the night on a busy, shady street? Who would lie elaborately to their mother just to save their nitpicky husband's pride? The author does come out and say it---no one's in the right or wrong here. There's only murky middle.
"Yup." Mimi blushed. "Charming the old lady, I guess. He teased me about my voice. Used that old line—was it F. Scott Fitzgerald who said it?—said my voice was full of money." She paused, remembering. "Now I think of it," she said, "it was sort of hostile. The way flirting is sometimes."
Dear lord. Just dear lord, Mimi.
Mimi nodded. She wouldn't start. You're so goddamn impatient, Bill used to say, the one fault he found in her. Well, she'd been patient with cancer. She could wait this out.
A little critique I have of this story is that just when we're starting to see past Mimi's superficial nature and cringe-inducing lack of self-awareness, to see that she does deeply care for her relationship with her daughter and is rightfully critical of Marc's idiosyncrasies, we're hit with a line like this. All sympathy slips away.
She contemplated her mother—a look, Mimi thought, like a very wise old woman's as she considers the basic ignorance of her audience.
The irony's so thick you could choke on it.
"And that's what matters?" "Of course that's what matters."
An innate difference between these two women, perhaps extendable to their generations, as well. Foreshadows the conflict to come.
Mimi wondered why he was still risking his life this way and whether he didn't have something better to do on a Wednesday morning; but then, when he flew through the air, she laughed aloud and admired his bravado.
Oh, Mimi. She comes so close to seeing herself here.
It was the chief joy of having grown children, Mimi thought—this conversation late at night in the grown daughter's or son's place (Mimi, widowed now, had two of each), where anything at all could come up. Mimi had no strings attached to her children.
The contradiction between these sentences is only obvious upon a close/second read-through. Does a good job of characterizing the slightly deluded narrator, too.
Nearly all of his acquaintances have reasons—and that is only to speak of the present.
The author carefully does not elaborate---reasons for what? To what?
You seemed to be shut away on the other side of a glass screen, where things were done in the way that you knew, and out there was their world, in which everything was otherwise, but it was none of your business.
It's fascinating how much Shirley struggles internally with her sense of social hierarchy, whether it be based on race, religion, nationality, class, family, whatever whatever. She wants so badly to believe she's nonjudgmental, but keeps falling back into patterns of ranking people according to preconceived notions.
Printed by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Making It Up by Penelope Lively. Copyright © 2005 by Penelope Lively.
So this was a previously published work
Now he was somberly brisk and controlled, but he looked younger, somehow; he was probably her own age, she saw, around twenty-four. Two of the lascars were just boys, another was almost an old man. The rest of them were . . . women and children.
Shirley's earlier concern about shielding Jean from death seems incredibly juvenile now, and aptly so---disasters like this prove that no one, no matter their age, is ready to fully acknowledge death.
"I'll be seeing you, won't I?" he said. They were out in the Indian Ocean now,
It could be a formatting issue, but the fact that there's no break between these two scenes is quite sinister. However, one could easily read it as simply demure, considering Shirley's character.
A child that age isn't ready for death.
Seems more like a certain nanny isn't comfortable acknowledging death.
She
I just really like the delayed naming of the main character (we get used to just hearing "she") and then this alternate use of "she" here. A small comparison between Shirley and the ship.
And those who could get a passage boarded ships bound for South Africa. Cape Town was said to be delightful.
Within these first three italicized paragraphs, this last line about Cape Town is one of the few indicators that we're indeed reading fiction. It's more common for historical fictions to weave their historical detail throughout the narrative, not dump all the background info on you from the beginning. Getting the context early on makes me feel like I'm looking at an exhibit rather than reading a story. Is it a cheap move in the "just get this all out of the way real quick" sense, or is that exhibitionisty tone deliberate? Is this a real, historical document of some sort, like a diary entry?
Coco stood in the truck, motionless, seemingly in her own world.
Though they live together, Coco's own world is indeed distinct from Jade's. Coco claims to know the city to well to be afraid of it, and fits in so much that she doesn't bother hiding her face in the parade. Jade's nervous thoughts in this paragraph continue to convey that she's not quite "there" yet---"there" being absorbed into Buji Town enough to lose her fear of it. Yet she still waves; she's closer to her home than ever before.
She could have been mistaken for an energetic and outdoorsy high school girl.
A crushing parallelism to "If Jade hadn't known [Coco], she would never have guessed what she did for a living."
Men liked those names, Coco had said. Jade liked her new name; her old name, Yinhua—Silver Flower—was rustic and vulgar.
A breath of foreshadowing here. And even if Jade doesn't end up assuming the role of an escort/prostitute like Mimi and Coco, we're seeing that this place and this business influence Buji Town people enough to make them want to abandon their non-city-associated identities. Setting is not just a physical location or a lyrical description, but also the thoughts and the feelings of its inhabitants.
She could hear the music from the morning tai chi exercise groups at Riverside Park, suppressed intermittently by traffic sounds.
I love how drawn Jade is to the less "dirty" parts of the city, even as the narrator is constantly reminding us that it's a dirty place.
The smell of mildew and damp fabric would linger in the air like mucus on a homeless kid's face.
One mark of a good writer, in my opinion, is the ability to smuggle metaphors into similes. To have your figurative language work double-time for you. A writer can come up with an apt comparison, a pretty turn of phrase, but a good writer comes up with a comparison that is not only apt but also illustrative of the world, revealing in tone, and/or distinctly comprehensive.
when dragons ruled the world, she would need him again
Very sex-essentialist
She felt stupid for every time she had felt strong.
This saddens me like nothing else; it's for sure the main idea of the flashback to Singapore. A quick and simple way to bring the reader up to speed on BRB's growth.
Since the arrival of the kid, they'd gotten into the habit of telling [End Page 156] each other when they arrived somewhere. Here. The other would write, Yay.
This is such a female-protection thing to do. Gives a new meaning to BRB's acronym of a name: "Be right back!"
He wondered if they were accepting this new visage because it was the face that fit him now, or simply because they loved him.
See my earlier comment about how the narrator is stuck in a sexist mindset.
The girls lingered for some time, unable to look away from the tortured Madonnas.
There's been a subtle thread of sexism running through this story; the narrator is used to women caring for him and keeping him out of a self-induced depression. His daughters are internalizing that, but at least he's growing enough to be honest with himself about his problems.
Still, the idea lingered that he could always saw his way through the forest and into the light; that if only he had worked harder at controlling the journey, everything would have been better, and he would have been loved more.
On the motif of travel anecdotes: it's less about traveling than it is about escape, right? Wilson can't clear the first leap of faith, which depends upon imagining your own world better than it is. Ipso facto, he feels he has to leave his own world to find solace, comparable to him tuning reality out with alcohol.
He wanted to lay his hands upon something that had endured, and would go on enduring. He wanted to see two stones, three stones, four stones fit so tightly together a dollar bill could not be squeezed between their seams.
The metaphors here almost fail to conceal what Wilson truly wants: hope that there's a future with wealth and a family in store for him.
I wanted to tell them they could smoke inside. I wanted to evaporate into the tree clouds with them. To the left of the couches, away from the [End Page 41] TV, a man lay facedown on a table with towels taped to it. The towels had been white once but were now smudged across with black ink. Mando’s fingers were eternally black. He reached to pick up the needle and shuddered, then went to the bathroom for a long time.
Wonderful coming-of-age irony
There are things you don't tell, and they grow knotted and hard, and you can feel them following you, like scarves attached to your ankles, like sinkers. My younger brothers are like this. My mother's grief is like this, even now that she has died. Then there are things you tell all the time, pretending they are your secrets.
This paragraph is the "thesis" or main takeaway I get from the story.