sashagoblin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sashagoblin) wrote2010-03-10 10:20 am
sashagoblin) wrote2010-03-10 10:20 am
March reviews
Patti Smith - Just Kids
I think I’m a little bit in love with Patti Smith. This may have rather too much to do with the iconic photo of her with her jacket over her shoulder, but it’s an impression rather exaggerated than dispelled by Just Kids, her joyous, touching, nostalgic memoir of her New York hungry years and her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
The pair met by accident, when a 20-year-old Smith with a burning desire to be an artist arrived in the Big Apple with no job, nowhere to go and little but her faith to sustain her. Bonding over the artwork both had produced, and united in their desperation, they moved in together immediately, sofa-surfing until Smith’s pittance wages finally enabled them to rent an ‘aggressively seedy’ flat so filthy the landlord halved the rent on the condition they’d clean it up. A variety of moves and jobs followed, until they found themselves in the Chelsea Hotel and the centre of New York’s thriving and bohemian creative scene. By that time, Robert had come to terms with his homosexuality, but the pair remained close, living together even when they left the Chelsea and their careers and relationships began to move them in different directions. It’s a love story, in every sense; not only an account of a love affair, but of a connection that goes beyond sexuality and familiarity into true understanding and devotion. For both, their relationship provided not only security and sanctuary from the insecurities of poverty, but an immense well of creativity and faith. They look after one another, in every sense: Patti helps Robert accept his early gay experimentation and his hustling years, despite his turmoil and its effects on her; Robert pushes Patti to perform and cares for her when drinks are spiked with hallucinogens or there is literally no money for food. Their belief in each other is tangible and touching. Smith devotes pages to intricate descriptions of Robert’s artistic endeavours, and while her own are discussed less, each time Robert is in the background urging her on and fighting her corner.
But it’s not just their story, powerful as that is. It’s also that of a world and an era that may have vanished but whose influence is alive, kicking and occasionally bashing doors down. The pair were the cutting edge of late 60s and early 70s creative New York, and the energy and belief and idealism surrounding them practically wafts off the page. They hung out with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix Kris Kristoffersen, Andy Warhol, Peggy Guggeneim, Jim Carroll; Allan Ginsberg hit on Patti, thinking her ‘a very pretty boy.’ (Smith is silent on the subject of what happened when he met Robert, who was.) Salvador Dali once declared Smith ‘a crow, a beautiful Gothic crow’ in the hotel lobby; she wrote a song for Janis to help her deal with being rejected at a party for somebody prettier. Bob Dylan appears at Patti’s first gig, and William Burroughs (‘Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer’) turned up on doorsteps of the ill with fish to fry. It’s a fascinating cultural document as well as everything else.
But the heart of Just Kids, in every sense, is right there in the title. Two people too young to know what they were going to face made a pact to face it together anyway, and stuck to it through thick and thin, rock’n’roll, sex’n’drugs, and everything in between. ‘He was the artist of my life,’ Smith says of Mapplethorpe, and the reader believes her.
Margaret Forster – Isa & May
It’s a strange book, this one, written with all of Forster’s customary insight and subtlety. The story of Isamay, whose name was taken from the combination of the grandmothers’ who delivered her despite their differences, and who spends her life negotiating the complex social and cultural distinctions between them and the parts of herself they represent, it is also an unusual meditation on motherhood, grandmotherhood, and the existence of some kind of matrilineal feminine tradition and the place of these bonds in a still largely patriarchal society. Lest this make it sound dull, it certainly isn’t, and there’s plenty of soap-opera action to keep a quite sophisticated plot moving, but the complications of the characters’ lives almost matter less than the questions their eventful histories seem to ask the reader. What does family mean? What does love mean? How much does history make a person? What do the generations have to teach each other? At what point does an age’s wisdom become obsolete in today’s fast-changing society? When should mothers, grandmothers, grandchildren, learn to let go? What wd it mean to ‘let go’ anyway? What, if anything, is a sufficient betrayal to undermine the claims of family, affection, history, hope? For a story that essentially never moves beyond the immediate confines of London and a single family within it, there’s a lot happening.
As always, Forster’s characterisation is spot on. Both grandmothers and their conflicts are painfully believable, and the troubled relations with their children arising from differing ideologies and life experiences poignant in their accuracy. Isamay’s often futile but sometimes blessedly effective attempts to mediate are touching, and her means of reconciling the warring factions within herself inventively recreate the problems of integrating familial, romantic and individual desires in a world where any solutions are often at best a compromise. For all its Austen-like small canvas, Isa & May asks some pretty big questions about the values of contemporary society.
John Harding – Florence & Giles
If Isa & May is strange, however, Florence & Giles is stranger. It’s somewhere between Sarah Waters and Harry Potter, with a bit of Wilkie Collins thrown in. Loosely subverting Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, with its demonic children and haunted governess, it offers instead what appears to be a sinisterly resurrected schoolmistress with dark designs on Giles, the son of Blithe House. The story is told by the latter’s elder sister, Florence, a young lady of creative vocabulary and decided opinions. She is, however, one of those notorious creatures, an ‘unreliable narrator’, and what initially appears an entirely understandable mission to protect her vulnerable brother becomes ever more sinister as its consequences unfurl.
Following in the footsteps of true Victorian melodrama, Harding doesn’t pull his punches. There’s ghosts, mysterious deaths, murders, forbidden towers, bumbling doctors, stern and forbidding uncles, spies in the mirrors, sickly heirs, tragically oblivious housekeepers. There’s even a suitor to the unwilling Florence, the talentless poet Theo van Hoosier, whose ‘lanky body rhymed awkwardly and scanned badly.’ It’s very atmospheric, in a Dickensian, Mysteries of Udolpho, Affinity-esque type way: Blithe House, for example, is ‘uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place...leaked and rotted and mothed and dusted.’ The novel’s tension is skilfully built and maintained, and whilst Florence’s overly creative language can be disconcerting, it’s certainly effective in establishing her idiosyncratic character and reflecting the plotline’s self-referential tongue-in-cheekery. If nothing else, this is likely to put inhabitants of any dark, draughty Victorian mansions off the idea of home education for quite some time.
I think I’m a little bit in love with Patti Smith. This may have rather too much to do with the iconic photo of her with her jacket over her shoulder, but it’s an impression rather exaggerated than dispelled by Just Kids, her joyous, touching, nostalgic memoir of her New York hungry years and her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
The pair met by accident, when a 20-year-old Smith with a burning desire to be an artist arrived in the Big Apple with no job, nowhere to go and little but her faith to sustain her. Bonding over the artwork both had produced, and united in their desperation, they moved in together immediately, sofa-surfing until Smith’s pittance wages finally enabled them to rent an ‘aggressively seedy’ flat so filthy the landlord halved the rent on the condition they’d clean it up. A variety of moves and jobs followed, until they found themselves in the Chelsea Hotel and the centre of New York’s thriving and bohemian creative scene. By that time, Robert had come to terms with his homosexuality, but the pair remained close, living together even when they left the Chelsea and their careers and relationships began to move them in different directions. It’s a love story, in every sense; not only an account of a love affair, but of a connection that goes beyond sexuality and familiarity into true understanding and devotion. For both, their relationship provided not only security and sanctuary from the insecurities of poverty, but an immense well of creativity and faith. They look after one another, in every sense: Patti helps Robert accept his early gay experimentation and his hustling years, despite his turmoil and its effects on her; Robert pushes Patti to perform and cares for her when drinks are spiked with hallucinogens or there is literally no money for food. Their belief in each other is tangible and touching. Smith devotes pages to intricate descriptions of Robert’s artistic endeavours, and while her own are discussed less, each time Robert is in the background urging her on and fighting her corner.
But it’s not just their story, powerful as that is. It’s also that of a world and an era that may have vanished but whose influence is alive, kicking and occasionally bashing doors down. The pair were the cutting edge of late 60s and early 70s creative New York, and the energy and belief and idealism surrounding them practically wafts off the page. They hung out with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix Kris Kristoffersen, Andy Warhol, Peggy Guggeneim, Jim Carroll; Allan Ginsberg hit on Patti, thinking her ‘a very pretty boy.’ (Smith is silent on the subject of what happened when he met Robert, who was.) Salvador Dali once declared Smith ‘a crow, a beautiful Gothic crow’ in the hotel lobby; she wrote a song for Janis to help her deal with being rejected at a party for somebody prettier. Bob Dylan appears at Patti’s first gig, and William Burroughs (‘Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer’) turned up on doorsteps of the ill with fish to fry. It’s a fascinating cultural document as well as everything else.
But the heart of Just Kids, in every sense, is right there in the title. Two people too young to know what they were going to face made a pact to face it together anyway, and stuck to it through thick and thin, rock’n’roll, sex’n’drugs, and everything in between. ‘He was the artist of my life,’ Smith says of Mapplethorpe, and the reader believes her.
Margaret Forster – Isa & May
It’s a strange book, this one, written with all of Forster’s customary insight and subtlety. The story of Isamay, whose name was taken from the combination of the grandmothers’ who delivered her despite their differences, and who spends her life negotiating the complex social and cultural distinctions between them and the parts of herself they represent, it is also an unusual meditation on motherhood, grandmotherhood, and the existence of some kind of matrilineal feminine tradition and the place of these bonds in a still largely patriarchal society. Lest this make it sound dull, it certainly isn’t, and there’s plenty of soap-opera action to keep a quite sophisticated plot moving, but the complications of the characters’ lives almost matter less than the questions their eventful histories seem to ask the reader. What does family mean? What does love mean? How much does history make a person? What do the generations have to teach each other? At what point does an age’s wisdom become obsolete in today’s fast-changing society? When should mothers, grandmothers, grandchildren, learn to let go? What wd it mean to ‘let go’ anyway? What, if anything, is a sufficient betrayal to undermine the claims of family, affection, history, hope? For a story that essentially never moves beyond the immediate confines of London and a single family within it, there’s a lot happening.
As always, Forster’s characterisation is spot on. Both grandmothers and their conflicts are painfully believable, and the troubled relations with their children arising from differing ideologies and life experiences poignant in their accuracy. Isamay’s often futile but sometimes blessedly effective attempts to mediate are touching, and her means of reconciling the warring factions within herself inventively recreate the problems of integrating familial, romantic and individual desires in a world where any solutions are often at best a compromise. For all its Austen-like small canvas, Isa & May asks some pretty big questions about the values of contemporary society.
John Harding – Florence & Giles
If Isa & May is strange, however, Florence & Giles is stranger. It’s somewhere between Sarah Waters and Harry Potter, with a bit of Wilkie Collins thrown in. Loosely subverting Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, with its demonic children and haunted governess, it offers instead what appears to be a sinisterly resurrected schoolmistress with dark designs on Giles, the son of Blithe House. The story is told by the latter’s elder sister, Florence, a young lady of creative vocabulary and decided opinions. She is, however, one of those notorious creatures, an ‘unreliable narrator’, and what initially appears an entirely understandable mission to protect her vulnerable brother becomes ever more sinister as its consequences unfurl.
Following in the footsteps of true Victorian melodrama, Harding doesn’t pull his punches. There’s ghosts, mysterious deaths, murders, forbidden towers, bumbling doctors, stern and forbidding uncles, spies in the mirrors, sickly heirs, tragically oblivious housekeepers. There’s even a suitor to the unwilling Florence, the talentless poet Theo van Hoosier, whose ‘lanky body rhymed awkwardly and scanned badly.’ It’s very atmospheric, in a Dickensian, Mysteries of Udolpho, Affinity-esque type way: Blithe House, for example, is ‘uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence, a neglect of a place...leaked and rotted and mothed and dusted.’ The novel’s tension is skilfully built and maintained, and whilst Florence’s overly creative language can be disconcerting, it’s certainly effective in establishing her idiosyncratic character and reflecting the plotline’s self-referential tongue-in-cheekery. If nothing else, this is likely to put inhabitants of any dark, draughty Victorian mansions off the idea of home education for quite some time.
no subject
oxo