Sunday night notes, stories

[radiantfracture]

It only took a few hours for the void cause by my phone's absence to fill with story, and I am reminded for the second time in a few months how much happier I am without a cell phone.

I thought the gym would be dismal without music, but I just spent the time reading the news ticker and making up dialogue in my head.

However, the phone is back now, with a fresh battery, and I do want to be able to text beloved comrades and receive earthquake alerts. I'll try having it live in the desk drawer and see how that goes.

The trouble with me, as I was telling A., is that all I really want to write are love stories in which a rather sad person is finally Truly Loved.¹

I finished my re-read of Penelope Fitzgerald (Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring) and now I am casting about again for bedside reading. Fitzgerald's mix of amused compassion and devastating human failure is difficult to emulate. My reading was interrupted by having loaned the collection to K. in the middle of Human Voices (poor judgement). She loved it, so I also loaned her At Freddie's, which, while it it is maybe not the absolute best Fitzgerald novel, contains probably my favorite scene in all of her work. (And K. guessed which scene it was, which pleases. And you may too if you like that sort of thing.)

{rf}

1. Well, a trouble.

Comments

[sovay]

The trouble with me, as I was telling A., is that all I really want to write are love stories in which a rather sad person is finally Truly Loved.

This is a problem why?

I love Fitzgerald's Human Voices and Offshore; I have not read any others of her novels except The Blue Flower, which I really bounced off and keep thinking I should try again, except I also keep remembering not enjoying it. I enjoyed her biography of The Knox Brothers very much.

[radiantfracture]

I find The Blue Flower extremely difficult to enter, and this does not improve upon re-reading.

I did end up liking the book a great deal, but that whole first section where we're seeing from the friend's perspective instead of Novalis' own is disorienting enough to put me off every time.

However, I know nothing about Novalis, so I may lack landmarks Fitzgerald is assuming I can access.

I know all sorts of people declare that Blue Flower is their favorite novel of hers, and I really can't think why. Offshore, Human Voices, The Gate of Angels, At Freddie's, and The Beginning of Spring are all much more joyful reads. I can't cope with The Bookshop only because the story of a bookstore failing is too sad.

Do you have another writer you go to for similar flavours to Fitzgerald?

I have a spectrum lined up in my head, but none that do exactly what she does.

(I cut a long list here because it seemed like showing off and forestalling any actual suggestions on your part.)

[sovay]

However, I know nothing about Novalis, so I may lack landmarks Fitzgerald is assuming I can access.

I read the novel for the first time immediately after reading a bunch of Novalis' poetry—which I liked—and still went spang, so I'm not sure an ignorance of Novalis is the impediment. I wonder if the author herself never quite figured how to get into the story.

I can't cope with The Bookshop only because the story of a bookstore failing is too sad.

I appreciate the warning.

(I cut a long list here because it seemed like showing off and forestalling any actual suggestions on your part.)

(But then I could end up recommending a long list of people you have already read! Also the worrying about showing off part is silly.)

From my limited experience of her work, I don't think I know anyone from whom I get exactly the same emotional tone as Fitzgerald. Millen Brand's The Outward Room (1937), Penelope Lively's Making It Up (2005) and Consequences (2007), J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country (1980), Henry Green's Caught (1943) and Back (1946), and Barbara Comyns' The Juniper Tree (1985) all strike me as similar registers of humanely observed unsentiment (not necessarily shared by other works by the same authors—Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) is a nonchalantly amoral, pastoral black comedy; Green's Living (1929) is a modernist experiment and Party Going (1939) is a proto-Beckettian farce of bright young things who never do get to the party). I feel there's someone obvious I'm missing who'll come back to me as soon as I'm doing something else. [edit: It's David Goodis, who is best known as a crime and noir novelist and whose prose while being technically hardboiled is welcomely and unromantically tender toward the fuck-ups that tend to inhabit his fiction. Nightfall (1947) and The Wounded and the Slain (1955) are the two that come most readily to mind in this vein.] I have heard Elizabeth Taylor suggested as comparable, but have actually never read anything of hers. Sylvia Townsend Warner if she weren't so rigorously cool.

[sabotabby]

The trouble with me, as I was telling A., is that all I really want to write are love stories in which a rather sad person is finally Truly Loved.

This is the opposite of trouble imo.

[radiantfracture]

(Morose noises)