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.

Misery Business With Pickles On Top

How committed this slim book is to rolling in the muck of listless, lethargic apathy whilst coming of age in the 21st Century. Commits to its protagonist without potential. A protagonist that is an alcoholic pregnant pizza delivery girl (yup, you read that right), who descends into her own mental wasteland after she becomes attached to a customer that reaches out to her with an odd request for pizza toppings. Pizza Girl just commits, takes risks, and delivers (groan) a slice (groan) of unlikable characterization that can be of an acquired taste this side of pickles on pizza. 

With the hazy hustle of Los Angeles as the backdrop, our Pizza Girl is trudging through the mire of her existence. Fresh out of high school, she lives with her Korean immigrant mother who idolizes any and everything American (subtly coded as American = "Whiteness") and high school beau/baby daddy Billy who dropped his college plans and sports dreams to become a proper, supportive father. Both are well-meaning, but dote on her to an almost infantile, suppressive degree. She also hasn't reconciled over the lost of her alcoholic father, as his chaotic presence lingers in the car she makes deliveries in and the backyard shed where our Pizza Girl retreats for early morning booze binges. Her deliveries have her in contact with a collage of offbeat characters, but they don't stand out as much as Jenny, and her curiosity over the frazzled stay-at-home mom who out of the mundane blue requests pickles on her pizza for her finnicky son, functions as a distraction from her daily despondency. Jenny curiously connects with our Pizza Girl, but soon an awkward one-sided infatuation grows, unfurling into something a bit more convoluted, insidious even. 

Fast-paced and readable, this has a dark, sarcastic humor mixed in with millennial malaise that at times had me laugh out loud or wince --- depending on mood --- as Jean Kyoung Frazier is spot-on about how transient, tense, and truly ridiculous, your emerging twenties are. There is also a familiar set-up here, as it is this zany tightrope walk between the adolescent acerbity of Juno, despondent minimum wage of pending mamahood of Waitress, and the dire delusions of Taxi Driver. It comes across redundant, but Frazier's prose allows her tale to wobble and walk well into being a wholly original and engaging world which I appreciated.

What I didn't appreciate?: Making a character do 180 serial killer shit as some dark comedic "character development". 

Yeah...big nope.

Spoilers abound...

O Pioneers!

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a love letter to Willa Cather's memories of her native Nebraska homestead and the immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, and French who settled on that vast and blustery land of mystique and melancholy during the 1880s. True to Cather's nature, she christens the novel with an independent and iron-willed heroine by the name of Alexandra Bergson, who after her father's death takes over the family farm, this much to the chagrin and jealousy of her disagreeable older brothers. For approximately 30 years we follow Alexandra and other occupants of the Divide, all of whom are hoping not to 'blow away' on this wild and unpredictable land they call home.

What drives this tale is Cather's picturesque prose. She is by far one of America's greatest minimal wordsmiths. She doesn't need to bleed purple to capture a feeling. Even at its barest, her prose snaps crisp and clean, getting right to the root of emotion. As this is her second book, written in 1913, Cather is still maturing into her style. She doesn't quite handle character development well as she has moments where she tells more than shows, and the characters aren’t as vividly explored as one would want. Timelines are also often skipped because we hear of Alexandra making a success of her farm by sheer gumption and keen, almost scientific planning, but we don't get to experience the toil or the complications she ran into as we're just simply told of it all. It was rare for women in Alexandra's era to accomplish a task of this caliber, and it would've made for great reading and a deeper sense of Alexandra’s character if this wasn't so lightly glossed over.

Still the word magic Cather casts make up for the lightweight action. As stated, Cather's prose is just so damn exquisite and it touches all the senses in the simplest of ways. It leads you by the hand through the yellow fields, points skyward to admire the purple and reds of dusk, turns your attention to the elegance of a duck in motion --- an intimate guided tour it is.

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring." 

Union Street

Who wants to read a book about working class women and girls who live in squalor in the back avenues of an industrial city north east of London?

Well, I do.

See, my hand is raised?

Still I'm not everybody.

Hollywood couldn't handle what British author Pat Barker was trying to convey in the pages of this book because in 1990 they released it as a sweet romance story called Stanley & Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. In the film Fonda and De Niro play two working class individuals who are at a standstill in their lives, with Fonda's character later on teaching De Niro’s how to read and write, the two of them falling in love during the process. I admit, it's an excellent film, and one of my favorite romance stories, Fonda is fun to watch and De Niro pulls out one of his best performances in it --- but the film isn't Baker's 1982 debut Union Street. Fonda's Iris King, the cake factory, a pregnant teen, and a man who can't read are the only elements that have any sort of association to this book, and these elements are still sprinkled with sugar crystals on it when they made it to screen.

Book publishers couldn't handle what realism Barker had written as she had a difficult time trying to find a publisher for the book. Nobody wanted to give Union Street the time of day because it isn't a pretty book. It just isn't a book that goes down easy. It's a book about worn-out, hard-working women and young girls, but it's not in the Norma Rae-rah-rah spirit, or wraps itself in warm camaraderie like Gloria Naylor's classic Women of Brewster Place. Baker wrote a book that is a stark and unsettling contrast to the usual working-class woman narrative.

Ambition Is Putting A Ladder Against The Sky...

"Stealing is very bad. Only really bad people take things that don't belong to you..." 

"Where do you get your ideas from?"

A question deemed formulaic and dreaded by most artists alike, as the answer is complicated, albeit a touch annoying and even difficult to answer. Divulge too much you come off pompous, say too little and you just might be hiding something. You just can't win.

Maurice Swift is someone who knows exactly where his ideas come from. They come to him easy.

Utilizing his charms and smoldering good looks, he ingratiates himself towards famous writers, not to learn the craft or be around like minds, but to steal from them. Maurice is a plagiarist, a story vampire if you will. He has taken the infamous quote --- "good artists copy, great artists steal" --- as a mantra for himself so he can reach his literary ambitions, for there is no other way for him to do so. See, Maurice lacks not only a soul, but writing talent. He wants to be a famous writer and win literary awards such as "The Prize", but he cannot come up with a original idea to save his life, and doesn't possess a flair for prose, thus he must feed off of others to replenish the fantastical image he so fashions for himself.

His climb begins in Berlin in the late 1980s, when while working as a waiter at the Savoy he captures the attentions of renowned novelist Erich Ackermann. Ackermann, lonely, aging, and fresh off of literary acclaim and a Prize win for his latest novel, becomes enraptured with Maurice and his desires to become a success, thus he allows him to become his assistant while he travels for his book tour. After some time Ackermann becomes consumed by Maurice, desiring to further an intimate relationship with him, but when he lets his guard down, Maurice takes advantage and uses his charms to coax Ackermann to divulge a secret that poses damaging consequences for the author. This secret enables Maurice to launch his career, leaving Ackermann's career and livelihood in a shambles.

Then it is onward, and upward the ladder to the next victim...

Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.

Novella November: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"

Dead Poets Society. To Sir with Love. Lean On Me. Stand & Deliver. Mona Lisa Smile --- Miss Jean Brodie tosses a floral scarf across her shoulders and scoffs at those narratives about teachers who inspire and want their students to succeed. Inspire students? Pish posh. Urge students to succeed? Sure you jest!

Jean Brodie uses the classroom as her own stage. She is the star of a show called "Miss Jean Brodie in Her Prime" and she wants everybody to understand that being in one’s prime is the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie is a teacher at a Scottish girls' school during the 1930s. She is charming, self-assured, well-read, well-traveled, and an arresting storyteller with a swell of opinions on just about, well, everything.

She's also full of shit. So full of it.

Sure, she's got wit and sass. Sure, she's a raconteur of an unconventional sort, but she's also manipulative and a narcissist. She's also a Fascist. Truly. She stans for Mussolini and Francisco Franco. If she was around today she’d follow them on Twitter, write annoying think pieces on her Tumblr, and set up a GoFundMe in order to gather donations to help Mussolini 'improve' Italy. Aside from her love of Fascist dictators, her self-absorbed foolishness makes her quite dangerous, unfit to even be an orator of any kind, but there she is, her Roman nose held high in the air, teaching at a girls' school, "putting old heads on young shoulders".

It's also a shame that she has her admirers. Six impressionable students named Sandy, Mary, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny who are dubbed "the Brodie set". The girls hang onto Brodie's every word, idolizing her to points of extreme influence. They eat, sleep, and live Brodie. Two of them even write fan fiction about Miss Brodie (and as a bonus Spark provides every cringing word of it!).

In the book we follow the girls as they age and Miss Brodie being ever present in their lives and never wavering in encouraging a cult of personality between her 'set'. Brodie is so invested in these girls that she goes so far as to spin fantasy lives for them, "predicting" how they will end up (one girl is to be known for her "sex", though at 13 she’s giggling about sex) Yet, Miss Brodie doesn't realize that her idea to put "old heads on young shoulders" is soon to backfire, because as the girls mature and become more fully-formed individuals, the glow around Brodie begins to dull, with one member of the Brodie brood falling into disdain for her once beloved mentor, betraying her in the end.

Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.

Come On Eileen

"I deplored silence. I deplored stillness. I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There's no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen."

Unreliable and unlikable narrators usually fall into two categories: fascinatingly frustrating or frustratingly annoying.

With Eileen there is deception, a grey area. A character that is an exception to such rules. Author Ottessa Moshfegh has assembled her in a ominous lab a la Dr. Frankenstein. You'll either see her as a disfigured, pathetic misfit or want to raise a pitchfork to a complete monster --- or you may find yourself somewhere in that muddled middle.

The voice of Eileen that we're introduced to is less than pitiless, as its in the distant present. She's older, calmer, and seems more at peace with herself, as she reflects on the muddled mythology of a time when she claims to have "disappeared". That time is the early 1960s, somewhere near Boston in a town that she distinguishes simply as "X-ville". She is in her mid-20s, self-loathing, and miserable, wiling the days away occupying two separate prisons. One she works within --- a private boy's prison where she shuffles papers and swoons over a prison guard named Randy who doesn't even know she exists. The other she lives in --- a disheveled trash heap of a home playing warden to her drunk and disorderly father, a widowed ex-cop who exudes verbal and mental abuse towards her on the daily. Vying for a way out of her hell hole, Eileen receives it one day when the beautiful, red-haired siren Rebecca Saint John glides into the prison as its new education director, and the two of them intertwine and submerge into a seedy reality.

This reality is what is warped. On the outside Eileen is seen as a dowdy, apathetic spinster, but on the inside, a storm of deviant thoughts swirl within her ranging from the sexual to the violent to the disgusting (TMI on the what she does with her bodily fluids...). Her unhealthy thoughts on her body and with food swirl around her in a cloud of filth.

"I guess that is how those sick people get by. They look like nobodies, but behind closed doors they turn into monsters." 

Even in times of self-loathing, she also possesses a superiority, this especially when she gets around her loathsome father, and her co-workers at the prison, but strangely, never the young prisoners she's around, she in fact sympathizes with them even though some are child killers and have slit the throats of their parents. Though she denies it, Eileen wants to belong, to not be as invisible as she's made herself to be, but she still has a "I'll show them" fist wave in her hunched shuffle.

"I was naive and callous. I didn't care about the welfare of others. I only cared about getting what I wanted."