I’ll admit I perhaps didn’t come to this book for the most obvious reason. I didn’t actually know anything about Barbara Pym or her books, but have read and enjoyed several biographies by Paula Byrne and so was keen to read this. I’m grateful to NetGalley and Fourth Estate Books for my copy of her latest book in exchange for an honest review.
Continue reading (Audio)Book Review: ‘The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym’ by Paula ByrneTag: author
Blog Tour: ‘The Vixen’ by Francine Prose
Thanks to Random Things Tours and Harper for inviting me on this blog tour and for my copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
This book was published on 5th August.
From the Publisher:
The year is 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, has landed an editorial role at a distinguished New York City publisher. Thrust into a glittering world of martini lunches, exclusive literary salons, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, Simon finds himself a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island. But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances—makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. Indeed, his parents mourn Ethel’s death.
THE VIXEN is the latest novel from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose. “A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive,” lauds Maria Semple, Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. The assignment leads him in strange and sinister directions, his naivety often exploited by bad actors and power players. As deception abounds, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon’s control, he must face what he’s lost by exchanging the safety of his parents’ apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot – and yet, that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future.
THE VIXEN rewards its reader with an eminently satisfying conclusion. It is the sort of work most needed right now. At once domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and heart-breaking, the novel illuminates a period of history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment. Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation, and learn to live with the mysteries of life and loss?
Deeply researched, with such broad considerations and hefty socio-political themes, a work of this sort might find itself weighed down by its own ideas. But in Prose’s able hands, THE VIXEN is dazzling and energetic. She opts, instead, for something at once more sly and more accessible, using the historical premise as a vehicle to tell a universally resonant story of love, self-discovery, and family. Like those accused of Communism across America in the 1950s, Simon Putnam is after, most of all, the right to define himself.
My Review:
It was the setting that drew me to this book – 1950s New York sounded impossibly glamorous, even if our central character grew up in the less salubrious Coney Island in the shadow of the amusement park. Throw in the world of publishing and I’m in!
This is the story of Simon Putnam, the Harvard graduate whose education has not prepared him at all for real life. Nepotism lands him a publishing job, but it soon becomes clear that Simon is very much out of his depth. He finds the book he has been given to edit morally dubious – it is capitalising on the deaths of the Rosenbergs while being heralded as the book that will change the fortunes of the struggling publishing house.
When Simon meets (and becomes involved in a relationship of sorts) with the novel’s author, Anya, he struggles even more with the morals of what he is being asked to do – especially as he knows that his parents would be horrified with his choices. However, this turns out to be merely the start of his troubles…
Simon is an engaging and quite relatable narrator. All at once, we see the dilemmas he faces – the desire to do right by his parents, his lust for Anya, his ambitions and attempt at professionalism. He really is caught in an impossible situation whereby the ‘right’ (moral) course of action runs counter to everything else – and would lose him his job and whatever he has going with Anya. His perspective is presented with humour and his narrative voice is lively.
This novel is really at its best when it explores the morality of Simon’s decisions in detail. Indeed, his tiptoeing around the situation is very credible and engaging. I found that I enjoyed this a lot more than the later parts of the novel which seemed (to me) a bit harder to believe.
The setting was hugely appealing for me. Although I didn’t know much about the Rosenberg trial and execution, I loved that this novel sheds light on this shocking and brutal episode in America’s history. The glamorous world of New York’s publishing scene in the 1950s is also well-presented. On the one hand there is decadence and glitz, but on the other we see Simon desperately calculating what he can afford to buy on restaurant menus.
Overall, I’d say this is a hugely readable and enjoyable novel that plays around with ideas of morality – not only personal, but also the moral choices made by the government of a nation. It’s incredibly well-researched, beautifully written and draws the reader into Simon’s world with ease. If you wanted to spend a few hours in 1950s New York, this would be a great choice for you!
About the Author:
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction including, the highly acclaimed Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honours, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Centre, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Blog Tour: ‘The Shadowy Third’ by Julia Parry
Welcome to my stop on this blog tour for Julia Parry’s book, ‘The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters and Elizabeth Bowen’.
This blog tour is organised by Random Things Tours and the book was published on 25th February, 2021. Thank you to the tour organiser, publisher and author for my free copy in exchange for an honest review.
From the Publisher:
‘A fascinating and moving portrait of love, loyalty and infidelity.’
Sarah Waters
A sudden death in the family delivers Julia a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they reveal an illicit affair between the celebrated twentieth-century Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather.
So begins an intriguing quest to discover and understand this affair, one with profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least for her grandmother, Madeline. This is a book about how stories are told in real life, in fiction and in families.
Inspired by Bowen’s own obsession with place and memory, Julia travels to all the locations in the letters – from Kolkata to Cambridge and from Ireland to Texas. The reader is taken from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s, to the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and on into the Second World War.
The fascinating unpublished correspondence, a wealth of family photographs, and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf add further richness to this unique work.
The Shadowy Third opens up a lost world, one with complex and often surprising attitudes to love and sex, work and home, duty and ambition, and to writing itself. Weaving present-day story telling with historical narrative, this is a beautifully written debut of literary and familial investigation from an original and captivating new voice.
Praise for ‘The Shadowy Third’:
‘The Shadowy Third reveals the secret life of the author of ‘The Death of the Heart’, a title that applies to the man and women whose sepia- covered correspondence led to this riveting memoir.’MARLENE WAGMAN GELLER (Women of Means: Fascinating Biographies of Royals, Heiresses, Eccentrics and
Other Poor Little Rich Girls)
‘.. a captivating mélange of memoir, biography, social history and literary evaluation.’ELEANOR FITZSIMONS (Wilde’s Women and The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit)
‘Even if you have never read Elizabeth Bowen’s novels and have never heard of Humphry House, his granddaughter’s quest will hold your attention as it held mine.’ANN THWAITE, award-wining author of AA Milne: His Life (Whitbread Biography of the Year)
My Review:
OK, confession time. As an English Literature graduate, I should probably be more au fait with the works of Elizabeth Bowen. Given that I focused on women’s writing, she really should have come up more on the course. And I really should have read her work since I left university, some time in the Dark Ages.
However, my lack of knowledge of Bowen and her works didn’t dent my enjoyment of this book at all. This is a book packed with interesting people, places and events – personal, literary and on the world stage. It is an impressive and engaging piece of non-fiction writing and I genuinely could not put it down.
Essentially, the story is one of a love triangle between Elizabeth Bowen, Humphry House and Madeline Church (later House). However, this is a reductive description – the affair only lasts a few years in the 1930s – as it also encompasses the wider lives and relationships of these three key figures, as well as a meditation on writing and storytelling.
The book begins with the author, Julia Parry, being given the collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bowen and Parry’s own grandfather, Humphry House. These letters come to Parry via her uncle, but it becomes apparent that Humphry’s wife, Madeline (Parry’s grandmother) has ‘curated’ the letters – burning some, including her own letters from the period, and annotating others. This is fascinating in itself as this woman – the ‘wronged’ party in the affair between Bowen and House – ultimately gets some control of the story told while paradoxically removing her own ‘voice’ from the account.
Parry picks up the story as being essentially one of place – important to Bowen and also filling in key information in the story of this 1930s love triangle featuring the author’s grandparents and Elizabeth Bowen. Each chapter focuses on a different location that plays an important part in the story, from the marital homes of the Houses, Bowen’s ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen’s London home and India, where Humphry House worked for a period.
These places have changed in the interim, but it is fascinating to read about Parry visiting them and reflecting on their significance to her ancestors and the story she is telling. The pictures included in the text are a huge bonus for the reader too – we can visualise these places and people too. This book is part travelogue and it is an engaging way of structuring the story. I loved the look at the last days of the Empire in India, the elitism of 1930s Oxford, the lives of the Irish country estate and the Bloomsbury set.
Obviously, the main draw for this book is the figure of Bowen herself, as well as cameo appearances by Virginia Woolf and Isaiah Berlin. This is a book that has literary importance and will be of especial interest given the recent re-issuing of Bowen’s books in 2019 to mark 120 years since her birth. We do gain an insight into the woman herself through her own words, plus see previously unpublished photographs of her from Parry’s family’s collection.
Through the letters, we see a complex woman who was – in many ways – out of step with her time. She is often contradictory, blunt and critical, but could also be a thoughtful, intelligent and incisive correspondent. Her judgements on Madeline are often harsh and her gift of a tea set seems a comment on Madeline’s role within the domestic sphere compared to Bowen’s own in the literary world – she could, it seems, be spiteful. However, balanced with this is a woman in an unconsummated marriage to an older man so maybe her extra-marital affairs are more understandable in this context. I’ll be honest – I found Bowen the hardest of the three figures to get a grasp of as I was reading because my feelings towards her fluctuated all the time.
For me, the most interesting figure was actually Madeline, Parry’s grandmother. I felt that the narrative was at its most interesting when we saw this woman – dismissed as dim by her husband, sneered at for her domesticity and unappealing children by Bowen – step into the limelight. As a modern reader, I found it difficult to understand her acceptance of the affair between her husband and Bowen, but also was riveted by the strength of the woman who followed Humphry to India, raised children without him, flew in a tiny plane in Calcutta in the 1930s and ultimately successfully picked up Humphry House’s literary project after his death.
And that brings me to Humphry. I am incredibly aware of this man as being the author’s grandfather so I am reluctant to be too critical. He was clearly – let us say – a ‘product of his time’, someone who very much lived the realities of the sexual double standard. He did warn Madeline before they married that he would not be faithful and seems the weakest of the three – the true ‘shadowy third’ (in my opinion) caught between two redoubtable, interesting and successful women. His appeal to these women is slightly difficult to understand as his own words reveal him to have an inflated sense of his own intelligence when his spotted career history and failure to pass the War Office’s IQ test tell otherwise.
I could wax lyrical about this book for much longer, but I think it is one that readers should discover for themselves. It absolutely should not be approached as an academic text or a definitive view of Bowen – it is something altogether more nuanced and interesting. It allows us to see fascinating glimpses of Bowen, different places and times, plus the sexual mores and lives of women from a period that is not our own. It also allows us to meditate (with the author) on place, the fabric of our lives, notions of legacy and narrative – and I adored it.
About the Author:
Julia Parry was brought up in West Africa and educated at St Andrews and Oxford. She teaches English literature and has worked as a writer and photographer for a variety of publications and charities. She lives in London and Madrid. This is her first book.
‘Eight Detectives’ by Alex Pavesi
My next new release for 20th August is ‘Eight Detectives’ by Alex Pavesi. This is a seriously impressive and clever debut novel that plays around with our expectations of detective fiction.
This book offers a range of short stories all held together with an extended interview between a fictional writer and editor about the nature of murder mysteries. The stories explore some of the main permutations of classic crime that people will be familiar with from writers like the great Agatha Christie, but the plots and devices are then discussed and dissected.
The stories are framed by the discussion between Julia Hart, a book editor, who has travelled to an island in the Mediterranean to interview a writer, Grant McAllister, with a view to republishing his 30 year old book, ‘The White Murders’. Each of the 7 stories in this book is presented and discussed by Julia and Grant, the latter sharing his mathematical analysis of detective fiction – sets and subsets of victims and detectives and killers which allow for unlimited combinations in the imagination of the crime writer.
It is a really clever idea and I liked the stories and the analysis generally. I thought it was an interesting premise for a book and it opened my eyes to some of the ‘formulas’ used by writers I admire very much – I’d never really thought of it in these terms before. However, I did feel like some of the stories were so open that there weren’t really enough clues for the reader which did undermine my investment in the stories a little – I don’t know whether this would be an issue with all short stories, but I really like character development and lots of red herrings to think about!
I can see that lots of people will read and love this – it is clever and engaging. Personally, I like a bit more emotional investment in my detective stories that I didn’t always find here – I’m not sure if it was the short story element or the mathematical approach that stopped me from engaging fully.
Overall, I would say that this is definitely worth a read for fans of detective fiction as it is unusual and surprising. It is inventive and will keep you guessing from beginning to end.
I received a free copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
If you would like buy this book, the link is below. I may earn commission on this at no extra cost to you.
Photo by Samantha Hurley from Burst