Tag: Booker Prize

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Strout’s latest novel would be a worthy Booker Prize winner

The latest novel from Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say, is her third to make the long list for the Booker Prize. It may be that this is the one that finally wins it. She’s been a name since her debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, in 1998 and each release has added to her stellar reputation. This is her eleventh full-length novel, and it’s magnificent. It’s a departure from her familiar cast of characters – this one focuses on Artie Dam, a 57 year old teacher in a coastal town in Massachusetts. It’s a gentle but unswerving portrait of a life and all of its connections – work, family and friends. Strout has an uncanny ability to weave the most unpromising, dull domestic details, the details that make up real people’s lives, into something absolutely compelling. 

Artie is one of life’s good guys. You can see that in Strout’s presentation of his approach to teaching and his students, in particular the way he models how to be a decent human being in the way he behaves, his words and actions. He is the epitome of fairness, talks to his students with respect, treating them first and foremost as fellow human beings. The result of this instinctively kind approach is to inspire love. Two of his students in particular, Danny and Rhonda think that Artie has rescued them from their very different predicaments. Artie is never fully aware of that, but Strout’s resurrection of the very old-fashioned but immensely powerful third person omniscient narrator means that we, the readers, are. It’s an awareness that lends a heroic aura to Artie. It’s a little guy heroic aura rather than a classical one, but Strout clearly places much more value on one and not the other.

Strout’s depiction of Artie’s relationship with his son Rob is one which all parents will recognise and envy – recognise the ongoing worry and the distance that adulthood brings, and envy the genuine quality of their communication as time passes. His wife Flossie also plays a big part in the novel. At first it seems that this is a long standing marriage that has settled into a comfortable and mutually supportive relationship. Strout, as ever, is excellent on the small details of life that glue people together and equally good at dropping bombshells that disrupt what she has painstakingly created.

All of these small lives (and she includes herself and her readers in that definition) are threaded through with major tragedies, high emotion and cataclysmic events. Just when you think that it is just going to be a small novel about small things, (with its pleasures and frustrations) it becomes much more than that. Big things happen, secrets are spilled and lives are changed. And if that’s not enough, her treatment of the 2024 Presidential election and the way that all of the main cast of characters worry about what is happening to America through the Trump and MAGA phenomenon is brilliant: subtle, realistic, thoughtful.

It’s an outstanding meditation on the gap between everyone’s rich internal lives, and what we choose to share with the people around us. To quote (yet again) the great Elvis Costello, “It’s the damage that we do and never know, it’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so.” As the title suggests, Artie decides to keep all of his most challenging thoughts to himself so as not to disrupt his own life and that of those around him. Whether you think he’s right or wrong, it’s a dilemma that most people will find familiar and one which generates drama, tension and high emotion.  Artie’s life and its attendant secrets will linger long after you’ve finished this short but outstanding novel.

Shorts

Some of the things I’ve been reading recently

Professional Reader

Creation Lake by Rachel Cushner

Another novel that makes you seriously fear for the judgement of Booker folk. Shortlisted this year, you would at least expect competence, even if it’s not a total surprise that it doesn’t live up to the breathless hype of the critics. I loved The Mars Room, her last novel, so came to this with great expectations, particularly after reading the juicy quotes lifted from reviews: “Reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture….a gripping philosophical thriller”

“Fast paced noir”, “smart , funny and compulsively readable”

Seriously, these quotes come from the same stable as J D Vance describing the main threat to Europe as coming from within and referencing attacks on Free Speech and Democracy. They are so far from the truth (Vance and Cushner’s reviewers) as to be actionable under mis-selling legislation.

Just like The Republicans/ Conservatives and The Rule of Law, Cushner seems to think that rules about showing and telling apply to everyone except her. Vast tracts of reported back story, about several indistinguishable characters slow this down into a dull trudge. Presumably it’s a “philosophical thriller” to compensate for the fact that it couldn’t possibly be sold as an “action” thriller. (or what we used to just call a “Thriller”) It also references the ludicrously pretentious ramblings of lefty intellectual Bruno Lacombe who lives in a cave and communes with Neanderthals. 

Here’s a taster: “In my Cave.. under my cave, welling up from deeper passages, I hear so many things…I hear voices. People talking….whose voices are eternal in this underground world, which is all planes of time on a single plane. Here on Earth is another earth. A different reality, no less real.” There are pages and pages of this drivel. Even his dwindling band of acolytes, holed up in a French rural idyll, finally despair of his frequent bouts of teaching via interminable emails: “He  (Bruno) claims his cave is a temporal labyrinth that holds the answers to the great riddles. At first, we all got  kind of sucked in. But when you pull away, it starts to seem like madness.”

Now that last sentence would have been a more truthful quote to plaster over the cover.

The Safe Keep by Yael Van de Wouden

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Another Booker listed novel, this time a debut from Dutch writer, Yael Van de Wouden. Set in early 60s Holland, it deals with the hidden aftermath of Second World War Dutch complicity in the holocaust, via the story of Isabel, a single woman not quite thirty, who lives alone in the family home. It belongs to her older brother Louis, a serial womaniser who shows no signs of ever wanting to settle down, but the threat of eventually being evicted weighs heavily upon her.

The house functions as an emotional stabilising weight for Isabel, whose awkward loneliness and social unease, chip away at her self esteem to such an extent that she comes across to the reader as an angry, unfulfilled, unsympathetic protagonist. She guards her independence and solitary life in the house assiduously, and is appalled when she bounced into helping out Louis by having his current girlfriend, Eva to stay when Louis is away for several months because of work. We also encounter her younger brother, Hendrik, in a gay relationship at a time when Holland was not the hotbed of enlightened social attitudes it is today.

The hostility that first characterises Isabel’s attitude to Eva gradually gives way to grudging acceptance before she finds herself swept away by a torrent of feelings she has denied herself  for so long. This changing relationship, and Isabel’s struggle to embrace the change,  is more than enough to carry the book. It’s subtly but powerfully conveyed, but the final section of the novel elevates it to an even higher plane, as a Fingersmith type shift changes everything. By the end, a beautiful and affecting novel.

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

Yet another from the seemingly endless conveyor belt of excellent Irish writers. This is Barrett’s debut novel (though he has done a couple of short story collections) and it’s great. It focuses on the resolution of beef between petty criminals and drug dealers in County Mayo. A memorable collection of characters and settings produce an entertainment that resonates long after you’ve finished reading.

Dev, the reclusive man mountain and Nicky, the hostage’s long suffering girlfriend (yes, that’s right, hostage) are particularly well drawn, with subtlety and sensitivity. Cushner could learn a lot about how to deal with back story from this. Barrett proves himself no slouch when it comes to lyricism either. This to describe one of the scary guys:

“He was touching forty but looked ten years older again, with a face on him like a vandalised church, long and angular and pitted, eyes glinting deep in their sockets like smashed out windows”

The chill that sends down the spine is fully justified, believe me, as the story unfolds. Colin Barrett is one to keep an eye on, I reckon.

The Legendary Scarlett and Browne, being an account of their final exploits and gallant deeds by Jonathan Stroud

The only sadness about this book is that it’s the final part of the trilogy, so we can no longer eagerly look forward to the next installment. That’s it. Finito. Done. Over. I was completely bowled over by the first book, and went through Stroud’s back catalogue voraciously. The Lockwood series is wonderful as well and it’s a huge mistake that the TV adaptation was so brutally culled after only one season.

Stroud (despite the “genius” tag on every cover) is still under the radar for some bizarre reason and frankly, he’s a genius. Can’t think where I got that from. He is the master of controlling a children’s  adventure story, manipulating cliff hangers, pacing dialogue and lyrical description effortlessly. Read the first chapter and marvel. It should be compulsory reading on Creative Writing courses as a model of economy and effectiveness in how to start a novel to hook the reader. But as well as the nuts and bolts of a twisty page turner, Stroud gives us subtlety and feeling. The developing relationship between Scarlett and Albert is so delicately done and brings a tear to the eye, but without the reader ever feeling manipulated. There is an authenticity and a truth to his writing that is rare. Do yourself a favour: buy all three books, wallow in them and then tell everyone you know who is interested in children’s fiction to do the same.