A Few More Books
Jul. 16th, 2014 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseKitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Anthony Bourdain) (2007 edition; original pub 2000): Specialist writes about his beloved field, warts and all. A colorful mash of frank minutia, which I loved; blunt honesty; and just a dash of machisimo. The colorful recollections of knife accidents and burned hands don't always make for appetite-enhancing reading during lunch or dinner, but the emphasis on narrative by anecdote makes this a fun book to read on the bus and train.
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (Piper Kerman) (2010): Prison memoir; picked up after watching the first season of the show. Knowing the writer is telling a story, it's interesting to compare the book to the series, and to consider how those diverge from the lived experience.
My Real Children (Jo Walton, 2014): Being a double life framed within the slippery memory of a woman with advanced Alzheimer's.
It feels like Walton writes a novel when she has a new experiment to try. There are touchstones in most novels, but it's not a career of series, or genre. One might point to an interest in alternate histories, looking at the Farthing trilogy and The King's Peace, as well as My Real Children, but then there's Lifelode and Tooth and Claw, which are closer to fantasy. The recurring concepts feel very humanist to this science person: family units; society and the individual. If, as Lois Bujold has suggested, science fiction is a fantasy of political agency, it's interesting to view Walton's novels in that light, where characters wrestle with the expectations they place on themselves, and the expectations of those around them, and of broader fuzzy "society", whether that's the alae and Urdo's court, or a girls' boarding school, or England in a doubled alternate history, 1949 - 2015. (And look, here is Walton on that exact GoH speech, interesting.)
Can this be considered a genre interstitial pattern? It's an approach that feels very steeped in genre, and awareness of storytelling as a craft, and sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't. People raved about Farthing and it slipped right out of my mind. I couldn't put down Among Others and I don't think I'll pick it up for years. And I can't forget Urdo's death, that was spectacularly visual. But there's a way that these novels feel like stones skipped over a pond. It makes for a reading experience more intellectual than emotional; a puzzling thing for the mind, rather than an immersive thing for the heart. And so this nattering on genre and plot, and trying to understand with the mind a story others have latched on to in other ways.
One consistency in Walton's novels is the utter indifference to the nuclear family as a revered or natural institution. Children are important; partnerships and loving companionship is a big deal. Love is not intrinsic or even particularly correlated to marriage. It manifests in My Real Children when Patricia accepts or refuses a rushed marriage from a fiance. Tricia marries, raises four children, and finds no joy in holy matrimony; divorce brings greater scope and happiness into her life. Pat shares a forty year partnership and three children in a loving relationship with another woman; if she desires the forms of marriage it's to reflect or acknowledge the happy joint life she's built with her partner.
There's a number of little... not reflections, or even foils really, in My Real Children, but perhaps grace notes where Patricia's two lives might have benefited from cross-talk: in one life Tricia loses a son to AIDS/HIV; in Pat's life someone remarks offhandedly they can cute leukemia and AIDS. That's not the only difference between their lives. Pat remembers a world with nuclear exchanges in war, where John Kennedy declined to run as an incumbent; Tricia remembers his death at a bombing and a world with a peaceful international moonbase. Incidents like those form the structure for the novel's final exploration, of Pat's personal happiness in a frightening, unhappy world, and Tricia's struggles for joy in a world less likely to go up in strife and repressive totalitarianism.
It's in that context that I had my greatest skipping-over-the-pond sense; I have the keen sense the final paragraphs should bring the novel together into a satisfying close, but I felt more a sense of things unfinished. It wasn't until I ran into her short story "Turnover" that I felt like I had a structure for understanding what My Real Children might be trying to do. "Turnover" is about the mid-voyage children of a generation ship, who contemplate the coming flip from acceleration to deceleration for planetfall, in a hundred-plus years, and realize they don't have to do it. Ultimately, one character concludes that "What I want is to keep everyone's options as open as possible, so that people can make their own choices when it's the right time" and that felt satisfyingly applicable to My Real Children.
If anyone else has read My Real Children, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it; this was definitely more of a thinking than feeling novel for me.
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (Piper Kerman) (2010): Prison memoir; picked up after watching the first season of the show. Knowing the writer is telling a story, it's interesting to compare the book to the series, and to consider how those diverge from the lived experience.
My Real Children (Jo Walton, 2014): Being a double life framed within the slippery memory of a woman with advanced Alzheimer's.
It feels like Walton writes a novel when she has a new experiment to try. There are touchstones in most novels, but it's not a career of series, or genre. One might point to an interest in alternate histories, looking at the Farthing trilogy and The King's Peace, as well as My Real Children, but then there's Lifelode and Tooth and Claw, which are closer to fantasy. The recurring concepts feel very humanist to this science person: family units; society and the individual. If, as Lois Bujold has suggested, science fiction is a fantasy of political agency, it's interesting to view Walton's novels in that light, where characters wrestle with the expectations they place on themselves, and the expectations of those around them, and of broader fuzzy "society", whether that's the alae and Urdo's court, or a girls' boarding school, or England in a doubled alternate history, 1949 - 2015. (And look, here is Walton on that exact GoH speech, interesting.)
Can this be considered a genre interstitial pattern? It's an approach that feels very steeped in genre, and awareness of storytelling as a craft, and sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't. People raved about Farthing and it slipped right out of my mind. I couldn't put down Among Others and I don't think I'll pick it up for years. And I can't forget Urdo's death, that was spectacularly visual. But there's a way that these novels feel like stones skipped over a pond. It makes for a reading experience more intellectual than emotional; a puzzling thing for the mind, rather than an immersive thing for the heart. And so this nattering on genre and plot, and trying to understand with the mind a story others have latched on to in other ways.
One consistency in Walton's novels is the utter indifference to the nuclear family as a revered or natural institution. Children are important; partnerships and loving companionship is a big deal. Love is not intrinsic or even particularly correlated to marriage. It manifests in My Real Children when Patricia accepts or refuses a rushed marriage from a fiance. Tricia marries, raises four children, and finds no joy in holy matrimony; divorce brings greater scope and happiness into her life. Pat shares a forty year partnership and three children in a loving relationship with another woman; if she desires the forms of marriage it's to reflect or acknowledge the happy joint life she's built with her partner.
There's a number of little... not reflections, or even foils really, in My Real Children, but perhaps grace notes where Patricia's two lives might have benefited from cross-talk: in one life Tricia loses a son to AIDS/HIV; in Pat's life someone remarks offhandedly they can cute leukemia and AIDS. That's not the only difference between their lives. Pat remembers a world with nuclear exchanges in war, where John Kennedy declined to run as an incumbent; Tricia remembers his death at a bombing and a world with a peaceful international moonbase. Incidents like those form the structure for the novel's final exploration, of Pat's personal happiness in a frightening, unhappy world, and Tricia's struggles for joy in a world less likely to go up in strife and repressive totalitarianism.
It's in that context that I had my greatest skipping-over-the-pond sense; I have the keen sense the final paragraphs should bring the novel together into a satisfying close, but I felt more a sense of things unfinished. It wasn't until I ran into her short story "Turnover" that I felt like I had a structure for understanding what My Real Children might be trying to do. "Turnover" is about the mid-voyage children of a generation ship, who contemplate the coming flip from acceleration to deceleration for planetfall, in a hundred-plus years, and realize they don't have to do it. Ultimately, one character concludes that "What I want is to keep everyone's options as open as possible, so that people can make their own choices when it's the right time" and that felt satisfyingly applicable to My Real Children.
If anyone else has read My Real Children, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it; this was definitely more of a thinking than feeling novel for me.