Writers & Lovers by Lily King

I read a lot of historical fiction (see previous reviews) because stories from long ago feel like a more satisfying form of escapism, because I think the ability to make the past come alive in a way that feels authentic is a true talent but perhaps mostly because I feel that I might learn something.  To learn whilst being entertained; children will tell you that this is the holy grail of good education.

However, I love reading books set in the here and now.  I love to see the modern world that we live in reflected back at us.  I'm interested in how others interpret the zeitgeist.  If you study literature, you will definitely be fed the idea that the really great and brave novels of our time have something to say about our time.  We study Dickens as much for his social commentary as for his colourful characters and marauding plots.  And it is brave.  If you're writing about Tudor England and you get a detail wrong, the historians will pick you up on it but the creative writer can always fall back on the artistic licence argument.  But if you write about the contemporary you run the risk of your readers, en masse, shouting "This is not how it is!  We do not behave like this or talk like that!"  The stakes feel much higher; your only defence being, 'This is my vantage point and this is my view'.

I give this preamble to explain that I had been under the impression that Writers & Lovers was set in the present day.  I asked my daughter to to buy it for my birthday.  When she read the blurb, her response was, "Hasn't this been done before?"  And I said, "But has it ever been done here, now?"  I skim read some reviews and liked what I read but perhaps I was most excited by the prospect of a modern novel.  These are, after all, politically unprecedented times in the developed world and I was interested to see what would come out of such a talented writer as Lily King.  I was not expecting overt commentary in the style of Lionel Shriver or anything like that, I knew what the book was about but still, I felt a certain disorientation from too much historical fiction;  I wanted to feel grounded in now.  Normal People was criticised for allowing time and context so little shape but it felt modern.  It was a coming of age novel with its heart firmly grounded in the here and now, even if Sally Rooney does not reference a date.

It took me about a quarter of the novel to realise that events take place in the year 1997.  I know I'm spending quite a lot of time on this and I will move on because this is an exceptionally well-written novel but, 1997?  I couldn't work it out.  King has a lot to say about the USA and her story is a damning indictment of the metallic heart of corporate America that sees artists squeezed out of existence and education a luxury that must be weighted against potential earnings and of course, the kind of health insurance plan that might entitle you to.  Keily Reid in her recent debut, Such a Fun Age deals with a lot of the same themes but through the lens of a young black woman in modern day America.  Reid said in an interview with the Guardian that she is "not interested in reading or writing anything that doesn't comment on the world we live in".  Big words, and of course, our world is layered and the writer of historical fiction is not necessarily avoiding comment on 'the world we live in', in the same way that science fiction writers are choosing a particular creative path to showcase their ideas of the modern world.  I labour the point because I feel that this book would have been better if the arbitrary year of 1997 had been moved at least 20 years forward or perhaps, as was Rooney's choice, avoid a specific year altogether.  As the story unfolds I saw that there were some plot advantages to the setting.  For a start no-one seems to have a mobile phone, only answer machines.  This gives our protagonist, Casey, a more insular world in which to withdraw when her anxiety becomes overwhelming.  It also means that she is not obsessively watching her ex-boyfriend's movements on social media which, we feel, she would be likely to, fast forward twenty years.  Equally, pre the Me Too movement, a back story focusses on her teacher-father's Peeping Tom antics which are covered up by the school he works at and he is quietly 'retired'; something we can hope wouldn't happen these days.

However, to dwell on the setting of the novel is to miss its great strengths.  Writers & Lovers follows the life of unravelling Casey, who has faced the kind of set-backs that are not extraordinary (death of mother, rejection by boyfriend, debt, a medical emergency, stressful job and poor living quarters) but which, when combined, threaten to mercilessly swallow her whole.  So desperate are her circumstances that she considers moving in with her new boyfriend, an ageing writer whose career has seen better days and who says things like, "I am forty-seven years old.  I was supposed to be reading in auditoriums by now."  Oscar Kolton is such an extravagantly grotesque embodiment of corporate-accommodating, alpha-male diva that it is a sign of Casey's desperation that she ever seriously considers his offer to move in with him and be a mother to his children and an obliging lover, all rent free.

These are big themes that King is exploring and all while showing us, or at times, just educating us, on how to read books; how to really feel them.  This could feel didactic and King knows this but it is her talent for humour that saves the novel from being consumed by itself.  Early on, her Philistine landlord says, "I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say."  Men do not come out of Writers & Lovers well but they do serve as good fodder for humour, almost as if Lucky Jim had been turned on its head.  Casey muses that, "Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy..."  

Our protagonist is unapologetically likeable.  We want her life to work out and when it does it is hugely satisfying.  I raced to the end, despite a voice in my head tut-tutting at the unrealistic, romantic denouement.  But Casey has been through so much, and it has been so sensuously rendered that we cannot begrudge her her happy ending.  The early part of the novel where we see how grief for her mother is preventing her from functioning, makes for such sad reading that I really felt the pain of grief myself.  Casey longs, at various moments throughout her day, to tell her mother about the events that unfold.  It is this longing, simply for conversation with a person we have lost, that is so striking and seems to shed some light on the creative life of a writer.  It seems to pose the questions, are we better writers if the books we write are conversations that we can no longer have with a living person?  Does the artist therefore need to suffer? Does the narrative have to come out somewhere, somehow....1997?

The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín

 

Mary, like most women in the bible, is a two-dimensional character;  a womb was required, the womb was named Mary. Colm Tóibín, in his novella from 2012, aims to flesh out the character of Mary. Yes, a man seeks to do justice to the story of Mary. 

The author himself is completely absent from the narrative.  There is no explanation or back-story and so it is, in many ways, an exceptional retelling of a story that we already know.  The environment of Jerusalem feels authentic, as well as the oppressive stalking that Mary endures from her guardians, figures who are there to ensure that she is complicit with their narrative of Jesus as the son of God.  Mary eschews this interpretation of her son's provenance but does not offer any explanation for why her son is the chosen one.  This, for me, is the slight failing of the text.  The story begins, more or less, with the rumours of the rising again of Lazarus.  When Mary herself encounters Lazurus, she notes, in her own ambiguous way, which allows for belief and scepticism:

    '.. Lazarus, it was clear to me, was dying.  If he had come back to life it was merely to say a last farewell to it.'

  This sunset starting point is why the book is a novella.  But I would have enjoyed a fictionalised account of the full life of Mary.  I would have enjoyed her retelling of the birth of Christ.  But to go further back would have required more dramatic licence, would have been potentially more blasphemous.  So her story focusses on the final days of Jesus's life.  There are times when, as readers, we feel close to a real woman.  Her account of the sabbath when her son was young is strangely compelling.  The quietness exerting a hypnotic stasis which would wear off as the day retreated:

    'The idea that time was moving, the idea that so much of the world remained mysterious, unsettled me.  But I accepted it as an inevitable aspect of a day spent looking inward.  I was glad nonetheless when the shadows melted into darkness at sundown and we could talk again and I could work in the kitchen and think once more of the others and of the world outside.'

Said every woman walking back into the office after a weekend at home with her family.

It might be unfair of me but I struggled at times to take the whole premise of the book seriously.  Mary is mistress of the eye-roll, her sardonic interpretation of her son's rise to prominence, at times, made me chuckle.  When she finally seeks him out at the wedding at Cana, this is what she encounters:

    ''Woman, what have I to do with thee?' he asked, and then again louder so that it was heard all around.  'Woman, what have I to do with thee?'

    'I am your mother,' I said.  But by this time he had begun to talk to others, high-flown talk and riddles, using strange proud terms to describe himself and his task in the world.'

My God, I had no idea that this was the universal experience of owning a son.  The echo of 'pride comes before a fall' is striking and yet this dialogue is taken almost verbatim from gospel.  Even so,  Tóibín's Mary seems estranged from this fall, documenting the hammering of nails through her son's wrists and the breaking of his legs as if documenting an organic life process.

As the book nears its conclusion, Mary's scepticism becomes irate and her questions are the questions that the faithful and faithless alike must ask:

    ''Who else knows this?'

    'It will be known,' one of them said.

    'Through your words?' I asked.

    'Through our words and the words of others of his disciples.'

    'You mean,' I asked, 'the men who followed him?'

This nailing, if you like, of the definition of disciple is effective in reducing its meaning.  It is only something that the mother of Christ can get away with.  It feels to me as if Tóibín was saving it until the end because it encapsulates so much of the philosophical heart of the book.  Why give Mary a voice if it is not for these questions that only she can ask, as mother of Christ.

In the penultimate paragraph, Mary takes her own identity back to that of mother, of womb.  It is a clever, circular appropriation of what it is to be the physical, female host of life.  Tóibín uses Artemis as Mary's pagan deity, receptacle of her worship:

    'I speak to her in whispers, the great goddess Artemis, bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her.'

In so doing, the novella draws to a satisfying close, where Mary's experience is entirely her own, distinct from that of her infamous prodigy.