Awards and Quote of the Week

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Kat | Leave a comment

Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award

I love awards. In the ’90s I loved them so much that I read the winners of the Booker Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and Nobel Prize Award, and the finalists and winners of the National Book Award.

I still follow them with interest.

Recent prize winners:

1. Lydia Davis, an American short story writer, won the Man Booker International Prize. It is always exciting when an American writer wins an international prize, because the Nobel Prize committee has neglected Americans so long (especially Philip Roth). I haven’t read Davis’s fiction, but I loved her translation of Madame Bovary.

2. Benjamin Alire Saenz won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection of short stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club.

3. Howard Jacobson won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for this novel Zoo Time, a satire of the publishing industry, one of my favorite books in 2012. Jacobson inveighs against book groups, three-for-twos, blogs, tweeting, and the death of reading.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

And now here is a quote from Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own Life: Isadora on the literary world vs. Hollywood.

Ah, the literary world. They hate failure and despise success. They have contempt for authors whose books go unread and sheer hatred for authors whose books are read too much. Try to please the literary world and you will spend your life in a state of rage and bitterness. But Hollywood is simple, almost pure–if total venality is a form of purity. There nothing at all matters but making money.

I don’t know Hollywood, but it sounds real.

Antidepressants in America

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Kat | 5 Comments

Sometimes I stare into space
Tears all over my face
I can’t explain it
Don’t understand it–”(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave,” Holland-Dozier-Holland

I own a Prozac clock, a souvenir of a pharmaceutical company. A friend who never prescribed Prozac (a drug that can cause mania) gave it to me.

Depending on the decade and the literature, taking Prozac (or another antidepressant) can mean: you have major depression or bipolar disorder (modern psychiatry); you are a madman or a madwoman (man on the street or 19th century literature); you have an Oedipal complex or an Electra complex (Freud); you are psychic, or the only sane person in the room (Laing).

Depending on the decade and literature, it can also mean: Mike Wallace, the great journalist who suffered from major depression; Kaye Gibbons, who is bipolar, the author of Sights Unseen, a novel about a girl coping with a bipolar mother; William Styron, author of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, who suffered from major depression; Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, a psychiatrist who suffers from bipolar disorder; and Carrie Fisher, the author of The Best Awful, who suffers from bipolar disorder and used to have addiction problems.

Alex Preston’s recent article in The Guardian, “Does Prozac Help Artists?”, made me think of stories I’ve heard.

I’ve heard about the time you went manic on Prozac and couldn’t stop running around your neighborhood singing “Heat Wave.” I’ve heard about the time you didn’t take your antidepressants and couldn’t leave your apartment for a month. I know you never slept before you took antidepressants. I know you lost your job. I know you were homeless for a while. I know you finally got back on track (or didn’t).

No one likes to take psychiatric drugs– Zoloft/Seroquel/Prozac/Lexapro/Wellbutrin/Lithium/Depakote–but they can alleviate the symptoms. There are different levels of depression and bipolar disorder: some feel very down for a while but get better on their own, others plunge into such a catatonic darkness they need medication; some spend a few dollars too much if hypomanic, but if manic try to buy a multi-million-dollar Lamborghini Reventon on a spree. Studies show that psychotherapy and drugs are the best treatment for these biological brain disorders. But many people do not have these options.

According to the National Institute for Mental Health, depression is the major cause of medical disability in the U.S. and Canada and accounts for 10 percent of all medical disability. The data indicate that antidepressants are both overprescribed and underprescribed: The Centers for Disease Control say that 11 percent of Americans aged 12 and older say they take antidepressants, yet 80 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by doctors who are not psychiatrists (they have only a two-week residency in psychiatry in their training). Only twenty percent are prescribed by psychiatrists, who have the training to diagnose these illnesses. But large numbers of people go untreated because they do not want to go to a psychiatrist, or because there are no mental health facilities in their area: great portions of the prairies and plains have few doctors.

Alex Preston’s rambling article in The Guardian is both good and bad. Writing about depression is as difficult as it is to write about poststructuralism, the 1970s, or some other subject with an abstruse lingo. He is a novelist who took drugs in his teens, and spent his 20s on antidepressants (SSRIs), even though his GP at the unvierity told him to quit. In London, he managed to find a pharmacy that would sell him antidepressants over the counter. The antidepressants blocked his creativity: he finally got off the drugs and wrote two books. Here is my problem with this story: if the doctor did not recommend the SSRI drugs, what did he need? Did he need them at all?

The ’90s memoir for the young.

He summarizes various books and memoirs about depression, including some by Americans. He writes favorably of the wildly out-of-date Listening to Prozac by psychiatrist Peter Kramer (1993), and then attacks Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994), a kind of youth classic of depression, which he says “has not aged well – it is stuck in the 90s, po-faced and narcissistic. It lacks the note of authenticity that characterises the best books about mental illness.” (She also wrote a book on getting addicted to Ritalin, so I think we can see she has authentic difficulties,)

Of David Foster Wallace, he writes that he went off Nardil (which is not an SSRI) but remained blocked “and, as his friend Jonathan Franzen put it, ‘when his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death’.”

He interviews some writers, artists, and musicians, including his brother, about the effect of Prozac and other SSRIs on their work,r. Some say they have been hurt by SSRIs and got off them, others say they have been helped. Will Self, the author of Umbrella , had problems with addiction and was prescribed an SSRI. He says, “Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol were really the drugs that ended up fucking my creativity; the Seroxat was just a way station on the escape ramp to abstinence.”

Mike Wallace

Whether to take drugs or not for depression can be an individual decision. It can, however, be a necessity. One of the most articulate persons on the subject of depression and pills was the late Mike Wallace. He wrote for Guideposts:

Like most people, I’d had days when I felt blue and it took more of an effort than usual to get through the things I had to do.

But I always snapped out of it….

So my down times invariably passed. Until the fall of 1984, that is, when I found myself suddenly struck, then overwhelmed, by something—an emptiness, a helplessness, an emotional and physical collapse—I’d never experienced before.

Wallace, who attempted suicide, spent a week in the hospital. The psychiatrist treated him with antidepressants and therapy. The medication worked, but when he went off the pills, he fell into another major depression. The antidepressants were necessary for him.

Let’s hope the National Institute for Mental Health gets money for research for better antidepressants.

Not Enough German Literature & Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Kat | 5 Comments

Not enough German literature!

I don’t read enough German literature. Americans don’t read much German literature, or literature in translation, period. According to the Economist’s blog, Prospero, only 3% of the books published annually in the U.S. and UK are translated from another language.

Universities have expanded their Spanish departments, shrunk or cut their German departments. Spanish is practical, they say. I often wonder how practical it is: do Spanish students rush out and converse with their Hispanic neighbors, do they read Bolaño in Spanish, or do they only remember a few words? Aren’t German, Italian, French, Russian, and other languages important?

But how to learn about contemporary German literature when it’s not translated?

I learned about Birgit Vanderbeke’s graceful novel, The Mussel Feast, translated by Jamie Bulloch, from a review in the TLS, which I incidentally began to read after Ursula K. Le Guin gushed in January about the wit of “‘NB,’ the reliably enjoyable last page of the London Times Literary Supplement.”

The Mussel Feast, published in 1990, won the German literature award, The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. It is published by a British press, Pierene, a publisher of European novellas, and has not yet been reviewed in the U.S.

It is a family story. The mercilessly observant teenage narrator, her brother, and mother await their father’s return from a business trip. The mother is preparing a feast to celebrate his much-vaunted dream of promotion, which is expected to coincide with the trip. And so Mum prepares a mussel feast, though she doesn’t much like mussels. The narrator dislikes mussels, too.

The narrator describes in detail the messy cleaning of the mussels.

That evening my mother, alternating between the small kitchen knife and scrubbing brush in her bright-red hand, was holding the mussels one by one under ice-cold water, all four kilos of them, scraping and scrubbing and rinsing several times – since my father couldn’t bear the crunch of sand between his teeth – because he would be coming through the door with his promotion virtually in the bag; not officially of course,…

The mother’s hands are red and hard-worked: she does the cooking and housekeeping. Her hands are unlike the perfect hands of her husband’s much-admired assistant, who is unmarried, fashionable, and paints her fingernails red. Sometimes the mother paints her fingernails shell-pink to please him, but only right before he comes home, because it chips off. The narrator says her mother goes into “wifey” mode when he comes home, and she and her brother despise her for it.

Their mother is a good teacher–she is very strict at school–but when she comes home, she is a housewife, constantly working to please her domineering husband.

The narrator and her brother help their mother prepare the dinner (her chips are perfect, even if they don’t like the mussels). They are happy and relaxed, but know it will end when the father comes home.

Suddenly there is an ominous noise.

The noise was coming from the mussels, which had already been cleaned and scrubbed; they were sitting in the large, black enamel pot that we always used, because it was the only one large enough to hold four kilos. My mother had fled from the East with this pot, she told us; it was indispensable for washing nappies, and she used to wash our nappies by hand, or rather with a wooden spoon.

The rattling is the sound of the mussels’ shells opening in the pot. The narrator finds this “creepy,” and is also angry because she doesn’t want to think about their being alive when they are cooked.

Birgit Vanderbeke

Time passes, and their father doesn’t come home. Finally they cook the mussels, but don’t eat them. They stare, repulsed. They begin to drink the wine, and as the hours pass, they get drunk. Gradually they express their hatred for the father.

The narrator, born with black hair all over her body (which fell out), was hated by her father from birth. As a baby she didn’t sleep, and once he threw her against the wall. The violence and abuse have continued throughout her girlhood. She is brilliant, and gets all 1s at school, but he says the standards are lower now. He equally dislikes her brother, who is pretty, who wanted to wear dresses when he was young, and who gets 4s at school. They are forced to spend Sundays with him, listening to Verdi, whom the mother hates, and then to go out on walks in the afternoon.

Both parents grew up in east Germany, and the trauma of the escape has affected them differently. The father needs total control: they must be a “proper family.” The mother had wanted to be a musician like her brothers, but the father won’t let her play the violin. She admits to her horrified children that she fantasizes that she is Medea, poisoning the family so she can have time alone.

Taut, pitch-perfect prose, riveting story, and an open ending that can be interpreted more than one way. A great book: hope I can find more by her.

Sex, Feminism, & How to Save Your Own Life

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Kat | 5 Comments

Erica Jong

Sometimes one wonders where feminism went.

We still spend hours listening to pop songs about the men who love us and dump us. We still love rom/coms where the girl gets the guy, even if he’s obnoxious. And we are supposed to want a romance with Edward in Twilight, a vampire, even though in Stephenie Meyer’s fourth book, Breaking Dawn, Bella’s longed-for sex with Edward leaves bruises all over her body. (Vampires and human aren’t meant to mate.)

I am reading Erica Jong’s How to Save Your Own life, the sequel to Fear of Flying. Jong sensitively explores Isadora Wing’s alienation from her husband, her affairs with unattractive male friends she loves, and with attractive men she doesn’t love, and her feminist philosophy in progress.

I wonder if this novel might be too radical for today’s audience. It’s not necessarily the sex. It’s the ideology.

It’s refreshing to read Erica Jong in 1977 on shopping and makeup as a substitute for sex. Feminists used to try to escape the sexist image of women as dolls who made up their faces, dyed their hair, and shopped for shoes.

Suddenly I had a vision of a whole world of women starved for sex and making do with all sorts of buyable substitutes. Making up. A woman who spent her afternoons with a lover would never again find herself in Bloomingdale’s fingering Mary Cunt or lusting after Elizabeth Ardent. She’d go barefaced as a baby and throw her charge plate in the nearest sewer. Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? The main floor of Bloomingdale’s by Hieronymus Bosch!

Very funny! And many women of my generation thought this in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and then we gave up.

What do you think about Jong’s radicalism?

The Summer of Aeschylus & Other Summer Reading

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Kat | 8 Comments

I am always fascinated by summer reading articles. They tell us that we won’t be able to read classics on vacation. They tell us we have vowed to read Proust, but won’t do it. They tell us we will apparently be too stoned on ganja on that island to read.

Well, they won’t tell us that.

I’m not going to an island this summer.

For me it will be the summer of Aeschylus.

My deepest regret is that I didn’t take that Aeschylus seminar in graduate school. (Writing a freelance feature on my wedding day wasn’t a good choice, but it wasn’t life-changing.)

If I could go back in time, I would enroll in the Aeschylus seminar.

So now you see why I have to read Aeschylus.

I am making up for the semester that was my last chance to take an Aeschylus seminar.

This summer I will read parts of Aeschylus in Greek, parts in English.

I have begun with the David Grene translation of Prometheus Bound.

Bright light, swift-winged winds, springs of the river, numberless
laughter of the sea’s waves, earth, mother of all, and the all-seeing
circle of the sun: I call on you to see what I, a God, suffer
at the hands of Gods–
see with what kind of torture
worn down I shall wrestle ten thousand
years of time–

As Grene says in the introduction,

We are never told why Zeus wished to destroy man. There is no indication what sort of animal he wished to put in his place, but, insofar as Prometheus in disobedience to Zeus enlightened man by the gift of intelligence, it may be assumed that Zeus’s creation would have had no such dangerous potentialities of development.

Prometheus says:

In helping man I brought my troubles on me;
but yet I did not think that with such tortures
I should be wasted on these airy cliffs–

It is the Summer of Aeschylus.

OTHER SUMMER READING. It is the 40th anniversary of the publication of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. What do you think of the new cover for the Penguin Deluxe Classic edition of Fear of Flying?

Erica Jong’s heroine’s “zipless fuck” doesn’t look like much fun here, does it? I mean, just lying there, unzipped?

I prefer the more feminist rendering of the “zipless” on the old cover art.

And I prefer Jong’s narrative to the cover art.

What do you think?

I am now reading Jong’s fascinating sequel to FOF, How to Save Your Own Life, which has given me more ideas for summer reading.

The heroine, Isadora Wing, now a famous writer, is stuck reading galleys of friends’ novels.

Reading was becoming more and more of a chore. I yearned for the days when I could sitdown with a copy of Bleak House or Tom Jones without thinking guiltily of the galleys on the floor by my desk.

Should I read Bleak House again?

Perhaps Tom Jones is more in the spirit of Jong’s books.

I do like this cover.

Anthony Briggs’ Translation of War and Peace & Read What You Want to Read

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Kat | 10 Comments

We’re on the trail, preparing to ride 22 miles to a small college town. Click click click! We’ll take pictures of the goldfinches, the llamas, and the cows along the way.

But first I have to load my book in the pannier, the Penguin Deluxe Classic edition of War and Peace, translated by Anthony Briggs.

“That’s too heavy. That’s why you have back problems.”

“It’s a new translation, and it’s what I’m reading.”

” What’s wrong with the old Rosemary Edmonds?”

“We don’t HAVE the Rosemary Edmonds.”

We have the 1923 Maude translation. He has read it once, and I have read it many times.

In 2005, Penguin published Anthony Briggs’ excellent translation.

Briggs’s translation is vigorous and compelling. It was the first new translation in 40 years. In his note on translation, he lauds earlier translations, mentions Constance Garnett, says that the Maudes’ version of War and Peace “is still read as a classic in its own right, and the errors are so few as to be negligible,” and that Rosemary Edmonds (1978) and Ann Dunnigan’s are sound.

So why a new translation? It is a way of finding a modern audience. He points out that phrases from earlier translations like, “Can this be I?”, “in quest of fowls,” and “ejaculated with a grimace” seem dated. If the Maudes’ dialogue seems stilted at times, Briggs’ more colloquial language can be refreshing.

Then in 2008, a new translation by the award-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky was published, and it eclipsed Anthony Briggs’ in the reviewers’ minds. How are they different? Pevear and Volokhonsky include all the French, with pages of footnotes. Briggs translates it. It’s a matter of taste.

Although Brigg’s translation is excellent, I am most familiar with the Maude translation. Compare these two sentences translated by Briggs and Maudes and see which you prefer. Scene: The Rostovs are preparing to leave Moscow, because Napoleon and the French are coming to occupy it, and Countess Rostov has asked Sonya, a poor cousin, to write to her son, Nikolay, and free him from obligation so he can marry an heiress. She is, as you can imagine despondent.

Here is Briggs’ translation:

“The ghastly upheaval of the Rostovs’ last days in Moscow had repressed all the dark thoughts that Sonya now found so burdensome. She was glad to find temporary relief in practicalities.

Here is the Maude:

“The bustle and terror of the Rostovs’ last days in Moscow stifled the gloomy thoughts that oppressed Sonya. She was glad to escape from them in practical activity.”

Different styles. Do you prefer “ghastly upheaval” to “bustle and terror”? “Repressed” to “oppressed”? “temporary relief in practicalities” to “escape from them in practical activity”? They mean the same thing.

War and Peace is such a fast-paced novel that it’s hard to stop and think about the language. No matter how often you read it, it is vivid and absorbing; you become anxious about the war and the foolishness of Pierre and Natasha; find yourself on General Kutuzov’s, because he knows that no military planning will affect what happens, and that it’s rare that the troops even to manage to be in the right place: and you hope against hope that this reading there might be a better outcome for Prince Andrey, Petya, Sonya, and Platon.

I have very much enjoyed the Briggs translation, as I have the others.

Briggs does, however, make an anachronistic statement about women translators that a Penguin editor should have omitted for the sake of not alienating his audience. He writes: “…from Constance Garnett onwards they have been produced by women of a particular social and cultural background (Louise having contributed more than Aylmer to the Maudes’ version), with some resulting flatness and implausibility in the dialogue, especially that between soldiers, peasants and all the lower orders.”

Being female has nothing to do with translating Russian. Class, perhaps.

READ WHAT YOU WANT. And now I am going to make an inquiry: do men try to control women’s reading?

The canon sends strange messages to women. Library of America, my favorite nonprofit publisher in the U.S., has made some strange choices about publishing women’s books. A few years ago they published a volume of Louisa May Alcott’s children’s books: Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys. Many thought these were not the most representative of her work. Then last year they published Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s books.

Women are underrepresented by LOA (I looked up the stats and it was appalling). They seem to be sending a message, particularly with their highlighting of Wilder, that women are children’s writers. I mean, why not publish Caroline Gordon or Hortense Calisher? There must be some first-rate women writers whose estates would allow LOA to publish their work.

I love LOA, and don’t mean to insult their work in any way, and I own many of their books. But….

MORE ON THE MEN’S CANON. Boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, friends’ boyfriends, friends’ husbands, and friends’ ex-husbands can’t help making comments about my reading.

There was the time I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and a friend tried to persuade me it wasn’t in the canon.

“Why would you read that?”

“It’s a classic,” I said.

“Penguin is just trying to sell books.”

“No, it’s a really good book.”

There’s nothing you can do about it. Some men don’t like women’s books.

I went back to my reading.

Men have a canon, a list of the Best 100 Books, which includes Tolstoy, so I can read War and Peace to my heart’s content, and Jane Austen, thank God. Gaskell? No. They never heard of her, and maybe they don’t like the women in gowns on the cover.

“That’s a fusty-looking book.”

It’s a used copy of My Lady Ludlow.

But what if I want to read something pop? Ross Poldark? Is that allowed? Many of my friends are big Poldark fans.

“Why are you reading that?”

Much, much teasing.

How about Rumer Godden? Not quite first-class, eh? Kingfishers Catch Fire happens to be one of my favorite books.

So whom are you allowed to read, and how often? Are the rules different for women? Are we expected to read more mathematics or science? Less?

Probably.

End of rant.

Fashionable Books: James Salter’s Light Years & Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Kat | 3 Comments

Sometimes I try to catch up with the latest fashionable books.

I am more comfortable with the classics, as many of you know.

James Salter and Edward St. Aubyn are two brilliant, fashionable writers. I recently read Salter’s 1975 novel, Light Years, and St. Aubyn’s Booker Prize finalist, Mother’s Milk.

James Salter is the most remarkable novelist no one ever reads, I have recently heard. His prose is “brilliant,” “beautiful,” “luminous.” GQ recently called him an “icon.” The Guardian says he’s “The Forgotten Hero of American Literature.” The New Yorker published a very long essay last month, “Why James Salter Matters.”

Barnes and Noble has a James Salter section now.

I maintain that he isn’t forgotten, because every book review publication has reviewed his new novel, All That Is.

He can’t be forgotten, because he’s revered. And he can’t be forgotten, because I have read him.

“Light Years is my favorite book,” said a friend some years back.

I recently finished Light Years for the second time, and am on the fence about this beautifully-written, but also overwritten novel.

It is a novel about a marriage. Viri is an architect in Manhattan, and Nedra is a bohemian housewife. They have moved from their apartment in New York to a beautiful house by the Hudson River with their two children. They entertain friends with perfect dinners cooked by Nedra and perfect bottles of wine.

It’s too perfect.

Both Viri and Nedra have lovers. Viri’s is his assistant, a young woman he’s in love with, and Nedra’s is a friend of theirs whom she loves rather more lightly.

There is, as you might expect, a lot about light.

On the river, the color of slate, the light poured down. A soft light, God’s idleness. In the distance the new bridge gleamed like a statement, like a line in a letter which makes one stop.

If you admire this lyricism, there is a lot of it. He writes beautifully about the change of seasons: I prefer his concrete descriptions to his similes.

I was very moved by the story of the marriage. And though this creative couple seems impossibly wealthy, we are told that they struggle, despite the pony and the beach house. On a more human level, I recognize the dinner parties, the intelligent conversations, and the creativity of the parents (Viri makes an Advent calendar; Nedra writes a book about an eel).

Here is a quote I love:

There are things I love about marriage. I love the familiarity of it,” Nedra said. “It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’re hardly even aware of it anymore. I suppose I’m very conventional.”

Nedra, who is talking about marriage to her lover, makes it clear that her marriage is somehow a part of the love affair.

Later, when her daughters are more or less grown up, Nedra decides to leave Viri and live by herself. He is shattered. It takes him a very long time to recover. And Nedra is happy, but she flounders. She auditions for a special life-acting group, where the actors live together and train together, but she is rejected. Yet she goes on.

Viri’s self-knowledge is more panicky than Nedra’s.

One of the last great realizations is that life will not be what you dreamed.

One cannot imagine self-sufficient Nedra thinking this.

Though I had my ups and downs with this novel, I cried over the ending. Nedra, a character I did not particularly like, dies before her time, and I miss her the way Viri did: she may have been exasperating, but she was fully alive.

On to Edward St. Aubyn. I respect but do not love Edward St. Aubyn’s witty, disturbing Patrick Melrose series, about an abused child who grows up to be a heroin addict. In the first novel, Never Mind, Patrick is the abused and neglected child of drunken aristocrats: his father rapes him; his mother drinks in the car; he has no one to turn to. In Bad News, Patrick goes to New York to pick up his father’s ashes; he spends every free moment, abusing drugs; and heartbreakingly has inherited his father’s vicious wit, and so the cycle continues. In Some Hope, he is on the wagon and facing a clean life, albeit at a party.

And then I waited a year to read Mother’s Milk, a Booker Prize finalist.

Mother’s Milk is more ambitious novel than the other three, dependent on description of domestic scenes as well as witty dialogue: it describes Patrick’s solid but frustrating marriage to Mary, a woman who is obsessively child-centered. St Aubyn explores the points-of-view of Mary and the children as well as Patrick. Mary, a kind of Earth Mother, is devoted to her two children, particularly the younger one, Thomas. Patrick bitterly says Mary has left him for the younger child: she even sleeps with the toddler.

It’s not just Mary and the children who upset him. He rages because his own mother is dying and intends to leave the family house in France to a self-help charlatan who talks about Happiness, Peace and Prosperity. Later, after a fight with the guru, the Melrose family leaves the house and eventually goes to New York on vacation, where they encounter the nightmarish emptiness common in European films about America (Wim Wenders? I can’t remember).

Back in the UK, Patrick feels guilty about his dying mother. She says she wants assisted suicide.

I don’t understand Mary’s passion for Thomas: well, I don’t have children. But her musings on her lack of solitude illustrate one of the reasons I was afraid to reproduce:

As she hoisted ‘Thomas into her arms, she felt again the extent to which motherhood had destroyed her solitude. Mary had lived alone through most of her twenties and stubbornly kept her own flat until she was pregnant with Robert. She had such a strong need to distance herself from the flood of others. Now she was very rarely alone, and if she was, her thoughts were commandeered by her family obligations. Neglected meanings piled up like unopened letters. She knew they contained ever more threatening letters that her life was unexamined.

Mary is expected to stand for Woman in a way I don’t find altogether realistic. I’m sure mothers see her differently; but I don’t personally know any mothers who are as devoted as she is. Motherhood is, of course, sone way she can distance herself from Patrick.

Patrick’s wit is scary, and the children pick it up.

So there you have it: three generations of men/boys with scathing wit, and where will it take them?

mirabile dictu