Going Back to Go Forward: The L-Shaped Room

There wasn't much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then. I didn't even bother to take in the details -- they were pretty sordid, but I didn't notice them so they didn't depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom. 

Call it a slump. A reading slump? A blogging slump? A blogging about reading slump? It feels the former. For a few months I've been 'auditioning' books, or rather skimming (i.e. reading about four chapters or hitting the 40% mark on my Kindle), trying to find a book to latch onto, that ~calls~ to me. I'm usually not this picky, not this indecisive, or take this long to read anything, but this year began...confused. Freak snowstorms, insurrections, vaccination drama, personal illnesses...my body and mind just can't settle this year as I cautiously emerge from a quarantined cave....thus I'm distracted, slumping along, looking for lit stimulation. 

 

To get back in the groove of reading (and blogging about said reading), I decided to keep it simple. Back to a 'simpler' time, a decade ago, back when I first joined GoodReads (!) and browse the earliest additions to my e-bookshelves. Lynne Reid-Banks' The L-Shaped Room was one of the first books I added to my to-reads list when I joined. Reasons? I had just seen the 1962 film, starring Leslie Caron and Brock Peters, and wanted to read the source material. Simple. At the time, I know I was intrigued that British author Lynne Reid-Banks wrote it considering she wrote The Indian in the Cupboard series, which I read eons ago in elementary school. It always interests me when authors genre hopscotch throughout their careers, and this was quite the hop. 

The L-Shaped Room has very little in common with the Cupboard series (well, except for its focus on main characters in confined domains...). Published prior to sixties getting its swing on, The L-Shaped Room was a runaway hit, the starting point for author Reid-Banks' writing career, and a memorable addition to the "kitchen sink" realism genre. "Sink" tales tackled the 'taboo' topics concerning the working class poor, and an emerging counter-culture of young British angst at the close of the 1950s (this a much more gracious generational cultural acknowledgment than the usual lambasts us Millennials get...). For its time The L-Shaped Room was quite a groundbreaking narrative as it challenged conventional ideals of womanhood, sexuality, and childbirth, broadening the conversations when most spoke of them in hushed tones. Further diverging was its "kitchen sink" voice. Here we're not aware of the thoughts of the usual angst-riddled guy, but rather a young angsty girl --- an unmarried-pregnant-after-her-first-sexual-encounter angsty girl --- a voice that crackles on the pages with all the frustration, fear, regret, and uncertainty in its timbre.

While today we barely bat an eye over a teenaged/unmarried young girl being pregnant (this unless there was some nefarious, criminal reason why she is with child...) as we have celebrities procreating without bling on the ring finger, and have reality TV shows revolving around the daily drama of teenage mothers, the stigma of rearing a child solo as a woman was often a source of stringent shame and judgement in the mid-20th Century. It was something that you just did not flaunt. To shield such 'shame', a lot of single mothers pretended to be married or widowed. Our heroine Jane plays a similar act, and it's how she ends up in the l-shaped room, as it's the one place that can swallow her secret wholly.

Young and so restless...

Fearful of the prying questions and eyes, and kicked out of her home by her father, Jane chooses a rundown, fusty flat more so out of self-punishment than financial worry as she feels a 'kindred' to the other undesirables, 'unsavory' castaways in society that inhabit the shabby domain. It's a colorful cast: golden-hearted prostitutes, a feisty yet motherly ex-Vaudevillian, a nosy, combative, but forgiving landlady. Jane draws more closer to her neighbor John, a gay Black trumpeter, and struggling writer Toby. Their fierce attachment to Jane is instant, almost as protective elder brothers, and they take her under their wing, helping her figure out the politics of the flat and how to control the pests --- landlady and insect alike --- around. As the weeks crawl by, Jane adjusts to her reluctant freedom, and finds herself drawn romantically to Toby, where the attraction is mutual. 

Jane and Toby's relationship is...a whole saga. Star-crossed in the worst way, the two of them just can't seem to get on the same page together, struggling to understand each other as the hormones rage, and Jane's baby bump swells. Their constant breakups and makeups, their ruminations and rants, seemed to occur every other chapter, and that became tedious for me, though their battles weren't without its realisms.

The complexity of their relationship rests in Toby's conventional attitudes towards Jane's pregnancy, this in line with common societal stereotypes and expectations about women's sexuality. For Toby, in all of his unconventionality for his own life, finds himself drawn to a woman that complicates his (outmoded) ideals of women, and it throws him into fits of frustration as he grapples to understand this 'new' kind of woman that he's fallen for. This combined with his embarrassments of his own inadequacies as a fledging writer and his quiet suppression of his Jewish heritage, Toby is constantly wrestling with not just himself, but the changing churn of time. A time that has our lovebirds in limbo, as they straddle their traditional 1950s upbringings with their 1960s futures where the times truly are a-changin'.

Reid-Banks was pretty bold for the time to parse down in text the various ways women are misunderstood and mistreated for their sexuality, as much as her sensitivity towards the idea and action of abortion. As abortion was outlawed in Great Britain till 1967, here in The L-Shaped Room, Jane contemplates if she has the right of 'choice', and if she's pursuing Toby more so out finding a father/husband figure for her unborn child than a true love. All of this is done with open honesty, not a preach in sight. 

Its in this non-judgmental prose, the naked honesty of Jane's inner thoughts where Reid-Banks develops flesh and bone. The human approaches throughout are touching: Mavis' tender mission to aid in an abortion. John making a crib and refurbishing the L-shaped room for Jane's comfort. The guilt-ridden baby daddy whose just as confused and must grow up fast as Jane. Her aunt's quiet liberation within the novel she asks Jane to type for her. Jane's father coming around to where he's now insistent on bathing privileges for his new grandson. These characters become more than the ink, and show the richness in humanity.

For its time capsule feel, The L-Shaped Room has a freshness to it where it didn't feel as if I was reading a novel written at the dawn of the '60s, as a lot of the same topics and attitudes are still causes of conflict and conversation today. Sure, lots of racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic dialogue ricochets around this novel, and yeah, it doesn't translate well into today...or does it? If you follow current events it's the same script, just a different cast. All that's missing is the social media timeline and a feral right-wing politician spouting such terrible epithets. Bigotry today is no different than the utterances here. Of course you cringe, roll eyes, and get tired of reading about John having a "Negro odor" and of Toby's "hooked nose", and countless other bigoted slights...it's not something I wish to read. I'm glad Reid-Banks acknowledged her mistakes in the heavy usage of such bigotries during her book's 50th anniversary, but I'm not going to sound the siren of the PC Police for such prose. Written was the truth of the attitudes the time, and sadly, these attitudes persist still. 

What is important is that Jane, our heroine, develops beyond these prejudices, and you're with her every awkward, challenging way, and that makes her a redeeming character more than less. While Jane is a character that I didn't particularly like --- she's naïve, narrow-minded, and a touch snobbish --- yet her getting pregnant and interacting with fellow flat dwellers leads to her explore beyond her purview, leading to maturity and self-discovery, and she finds a form of humbleness that endears her by book's end. I'm actually curious to read the sequels (1970's The Backwards Shadow and 1974's Two Is Lonely) to see her develop further with child in tow, and yeah, I admit, to continue the saga that is Jane and Toby finding love in a hopeless place. 

One caveat: After reading Pat Barker's Union Street, a story like The L-Shaped Room seems a little cute, quaint even. Jane isn't in total squalor, and her support system is much more welcoming and forgiving than any that the women in that novel ever had. Union Street, missing the kitchen sink canon by several years, features no 'ready-made' love interests, substitute fathers, mothers, or women having the luxury to choose independence over love, or having both co-exist. Union looks at the bottom of the barrel and sees nothing to salvage. The grime and gristle of daily life in Union is unremovable, no matter how hard you scrub. The baby comes, nobody cares or celebrates. The cupboard is bare, and remains so. You lose your job, and your boss isn't willing to care about you thereafter, he barely knows your name after all. With L-Shaped there is something to salvage in conflict, possible fixes to mistakes, there is hope. We all live in our own ready-made l-shaped rooms, its our will, our choice to come out of them. Does this distract from the pleasure of the text? No, you have to pick your poison there as Barker and Reid-Banks approach the difficulties of growing up girl in diverse ways, but nothing short of real.

As for the film version: Reid-Banks disavowed Bryan Forbes-directed film, and I can kind of glean why. Making Jane a French native instead of British does defeat the purpose of the narrative. Such a change loses some cultural punch for her character as the social implications feel incongruent with the British New Wave, as does Jane's character development and association with her surroundings. Of course Hollywood's modus operandi is to 'glamourize' and embellish the ordinary, yet this story required a realist view, and a character more grounded and relatable as in the book. As admirable a job Caron does in her role, her poise and style come across as tres chic, tres cool. Someone whom being pregnant is just another day, not a complicated, life-altering matter. We know she'll be okay. Jane in book? We don't, and we're rooting for her to be. Visually? The film is definitely worth a watch. It's a striking snapshot of early 1960s Britain, peppered with beehives and beatniks, focused on a world that feels so distant in its mode, but is actually closer to now in its attitudes than most.