1. So…did they, like, go to the bathroom at all?

2. Really, bludgeoning each other to death for status and a share of the resources would definitely be simpler and probably more dignified than job-hunting in this economy.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a lot to like about this book, but even if I hated the story, I think the beautiful, loving descriptions of life in Mexico would still have captured me. It made me want to move there right now and paint my house blue! (Although realistically, I realize now is maybe not the best time to relocate to Mexico – this book is set in the ’30s.)

At first, I thought the book’s second half didn’t live up to the promise of its first. The first half is all Mexico, and Frida and Diego, and revolution and Trotsky and assassination attempts and unrequited love in a small bunk room and boat rides through flower petals and murder and sorrow, and the second half is all letters and North Carolina and writing time and housecats and lawyers and stenographers and repression and hiding away to lick your wounds. You get halfway through, and you’re like, “The book’s over. What are all these pages?”

But then I realized this structure is intentional, of course, and works really well. It echoes themes and whatnot, I don’t feel like getting into it.

Blue house!

View all my reviews

…I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.’ A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting.     – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.     – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

We threaded our way around a group of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences…     – Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

“Ahaha,” I agreed politely while Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous braying.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

“You know,” he said after a moment. “I never meant you to think, that time, that I was saying you were self-absorbed, or something of that sort.” “Oh, I know,” I said. When had he said I was self-absorbed? “I don’t think of myself as a particularly self-absorbed person, so it wouldn’t really have struck home in any case.” How strange. So Rafe had accused me of being self-absorbed.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

‘Dark feelings can become a habit,’ he’d said to me once when we were talking – arguing – about this. ‘And if they’re strong enough, like many strong feelings they can even be enjoyable.’ He said that this was why the peace process wasn’t working, that the whole population was locked in a trance of grief that they didn’t break out of because it defined them, it made them feel real.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Palestinians are beginning to discover the possibilities of nonviolence, which Israel, with its ethical and political traditions, would find far harder to resist than rocks and rockets. The longer the occupation lasts, and the larger the Arab and Palestinian populations grow in territory under Israeli control, the more untenable Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic becomes.     – Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker

‘…Conventional life always expects you to meet it more than halfway. You should give yourself the benefit of the doubt from time to time.’     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

It was years before I could see why he was doing it – alarm, I suspect, at the unadorned reality of my own personality. Be that as it may, once you’re conscious of what’s happening, it’s incredibly tiresome.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.     - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday

Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty, I saw, shocked.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

We can’t expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin’s. And we really need to let these people get married, already.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Ellen calls and asks what I’m doing with myself. When I say I don’t really know, she says, “Well, I mean, you get up, and then what do you do?” Sometimes it seems to me that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

It angers me that I must be so assertive on such shaky grounds to make people believe that I run, and that when they believe me, they don’t care.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

But Al Qaeda long ago fled to all corners, changing its mailing address to franchise cells in Waziristan, Peshawar, southern Yemen, and housing projects in European cities. Bin Laden’s death underscores the question of why we go on losing young men and women daily in the defense of an indefensibly corrupt government in Kabul.     – David Remnick, The New Yorker

That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of speculation — sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

I cry like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

Men I had met before suddenly paid attention to me…and I hated them for it.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.     - Tina Fey, Bossypants

…she had sat through numbers of futile interviews and sent out numbers of futile resumes. The city, in fact, appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any nineteenth-century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

This is what I like to tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another.     – Tina Fey, Bossypants

Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits.     – Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker

Darrow wasn’t a philosopher; he wasn’t even an iconoclast. He was an agonist. He would argue one way; he would argue another; he just didn’t want to see bigotry thrive or watch a man die. He liked to say that creeds were dope: “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right.”     – Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

I asked the demonstrators around me, “What are we protesting today?” A university student named Latifa said, “The Interior Ministry refuses to let women be photographed for their identity cards wearing the hijab . . . They force women to remove the hijab,” she continued. “This is an insult to Islam. We are demanding that the ministry allow us to wear the hijab at all times.” Oh.      - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

…sessions covered everything from search engine optimization for doctors’ Web sites to “The Blue Plate Special,” a urogynecologist’s advice on how to persuade a patient to add cosmetic-gyn to an incontinence surgery.     – Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The Atlantic

“What are you doing?” he said, aghast. “Out. Now. Out, out.” She picked up the suitcase in one hand and shooed Stuart to the door with the other. “This is enough to get by on for a while. Let me know where you are and I’ll send the rest on to you.” “You know,” Stuart said as he trotted down the hall in front of her, “Marcia kept saying, ‘Oh, Patty is so centered. Patty is such a woman,’ but actually, Patty, you’re a very nervous person.” On the street Patty flagged down a taxi. “Take this guy to Port Authority,” she said, giving the driver a ten. She shoved Stuart into the back seat next to his suitcase and ran along behind the taxi as it took off, flapping her skirt. As she walked back down the hall, whimpering, Mr. Martinez peered out from his doorway. “The mens – the mens-” he said, his voice vibrant with commiseration. “They must do this thing. Do not cry, missy. He will come back.”     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

And when Patty returned to George’s table later, she found only more change than he could afford, she knew, and on his plate a pile of little bones that suggested he’d curled up there and died.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like – it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can – it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. . . . The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was forever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were forever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

Did the government believe its citizens would survive nuclear attack by hiding in holes in their back yards? Not really, Roy said. The security technologist Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theatre” to describe certain measures, such as post-9/11 T.S.A. pat-downs and subway bag checks, which, he says, improve feelings of security while doing little or nothing to protect people.     – Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker

Getting patients to acknowledge their own disorders also has become an ethical imperative. Implicit in the doctrine of informed consent is the notion that before agreeing to take medication patients should be aware of the nature and course of their own illnesses. In balancing rights against needs, though, psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish.     - Rachel Aviv,The New Yorker

Deinstitutionalization was a nationwide social experiment that did not go as planned. Overgrown hospitals were shut down or emptied, but many fewer community centers were opened than had been proposed. Resources steadily declined; in just the past three years, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets. “Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a health-care system as if it did not exist,” Paul Appelbaum said in his 2002 inaugural address as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Today, there are three times as many mentally ill people in jails as in hospitals. Others end up on the streets.     – Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker

Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own.     – Henry James, The Ambassadors

Outside, too, was the London Marta had come to but had never before entered.     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls – this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock – but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life!     - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out. For example, he might start off with “The effect of the man’s speech was as if he were a tippler who…” then meanders here, there, and over there to the other bar, and then wanders back toward you, but veering off at the last second, borrows several drinks (by which I mean to imply words) off surrounding tables (by which I mean, words that ought to belong to other sentences entirely), and then, seeing the end of the sentence approaching (which, by continuation of our metaphor, would be meant to suggest the end of the night, or bed, or the end of drinking festivities, which drunk would prefer at all accounts to avoid and so stalls to keep off at a distance), he throws any number of adverbs, barstools, prepositions, gerunds and the like in between himself and that end, and once you are fully convinced he has lost all sight of his aim in telling you the original anecdote he had introduced, he sometimes arrives back at that point, but other times, he does not, and if you were to map his meanderings, it would take a smarter person than most readers nowadays to derive any sense from it, and at that point, the other woman whirled right out of the room, and the first, though not affected by the same thing to the same degree of the latter, or rather, it was the same thing, but she did not derive from it the same intent, but was nevertheless affected in a different way of her own, said, “My word, what a lot of…” but then hung fire.

So, that’s what reading The Ambassadors is like all the way through. The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was. The premise of the book is that the narrator has been sent to bring back his fiancé’s son, who is having an illicit affair with a married (she’s permanently separated from her abusive husband) woman in Paris, but when he gets there, he really likes the woman and he really likes Paris, and he really likes the son more than he did before, and so he decides the son might be better off there. But he convinces himself (somewhat) that maybe the son’s relationship with the married woman isn’t technically sexual, and then (spoiler alert…?) at the end, he has this big realization when he can’t pretend anymore that it isn’t. Except, being a modern young woman, I didn’t get that AT ALL, and read the whole thing assuming that he knew they were a full-fledged couple, but that he didn’t, in these particular circumstances, think it was immoral. So then, when his grand realization came, I was all, “Oh, wait, hold on. This was a thing? Oh, I guess it was THE thing. Where have I been?”

JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN, HENRY JAMES!! Actually, this is a really hilarious novel when looked at in hindsight, but as you’re thwacking through the jungle of it, it’s pretty tiresome, and also, I think I am far too stupid to understand this book.

View all my reviews

Titles of Less Interesting Books

1. Sense and Stability

2. Elizabeth Urello’s Diary

3. Infinite Pun

4. A Visit From the Pep Squad

5. To the Outhouse

6. The Daily Routine of Kavalier & Clay

7. Eat Pray Sleep

8. The Phantom of the Office

9. The Sound and the Comprehension of That Sound

10. The Long Well-Adjusted Life of Oscar Wao

11. Let Me Go Immediately

12. Calvin & Susie

13. Tender Is the Chicken

14. The Mortgaging of Hill House

15. The Bearable Lightness of Being With Jesus

What do you guys think of Twitter? Are you long-form or short-form interneters?

I have some sympathy for Carmen Callil. Her actions are counterproductive, though, because now everyone’s going to be passionately defending Philip Roth’s literary reputation for weeks (well, days) and complaining about sour feminists, when if they’d just given him the prize without any controversy, everyone would have been like, “Roth again? Yawn! Why didn’t they give this one to Marilynne Robinson?”

But I think she just snapped, and we’ve all been there – as a reader, how many times are you told, “Okay. This guy was really messed up about women, but you just have to ignore all the blatant horrifying misogyny, and then, you have to admit, he’s a genius!” It’s constant. And most of the time, because women are great about doing this, because we – and it can’t be said often enough – do it all the time in every form of culture ever, we concede the point. We forgive the constant brutal, graphic rapes and the ‘mothers are manipulative, evil hags’ stuff and ‘I just want to kill my castrating wife’ stuff and the constant reducing of all women to two-dimensional jizz receptacles, and we overlook all that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. If you overlook the 90% of it that’s repeatedly telling us that we better never for a second think we have any power or status in our society whatsoever, it really is an amazing work of art.” (Meanwhile, ask some guys to come with you to see a movie with women in it, or pink somewhere on the poster, and it’s like you’re asking them to lick a public toilet.)

Anyway, eventually every single reading woman (and sometimes, a reading man) reaches that point where she just goes, “That’s it! That is it! I’m done! I do not have to overlook it and admit the genius! I do not have to admit any fucking knob’s genius anymore! I’m done! I am only ever reading stuff by women from now on forever and that’s it! YOU can overlook the dress descriptions and the stupid wedding at the end, and admit that this woman is a genius! YOU OVERLOOK SOMETHING FOR ONCE, DAMN IT!”

And then you have to go off by yourself for awhile and take some deep breaths, especially since you weren’t even talking to anyone specific, but just yelling at the air in front of your face, and you weren’t even reading anything at the moment, but just sitting there, thinking about stuff and seething. Plus, some of your favorite writers are men.

Ideally, you do not throw this tantrum publicly, while you are serving as one of the judges for a major literary prize.

Anyway, we’ve all been there. I can understand how Callil feels, although I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not Roth should have won – I’ve only read American Pastoral (I read it in Vietnam, which I think informed and added to my reading experience¹), and I haven’t read everyone on the shortlist, but most current readers are not all that sad that the days of RothMailerUpdike dominance are ending (although I still plan to get around to reading those dudes some day).

If you ever have a moment of literary despair, it pays to remember that contemporary fiction is absolutely exploding with awesome writers, many of them women. Look at Jennifer Egan! I mean, I didn’t like her book that much, but everybody else loved it, and she won both the NBCC Award and the Pulitzer. Additionally, up-and-coming male writers have finally realized that being entirely dismissive of and confused about half the world’s population rather limits your ability to be a great recorder of the human condition, and literary misogyny is (I really think, though some people will argue with me) on the wane.

Here are some fantastic books I would recommend for anyone who needs a little break from being reasonable and open-minded about offensive content. Not only are these great books about women (I think? Maybe a couple are about men²), but they are not about “women’s issues”. They are not specifically about feminism or stifling marriages or dealing with abuse or anything like that (well, maybe some of them are a little bit, but those are not the elements I primarily remember about them)(and not that there’s anything wrong with books on those topics, but that’s not what we’re after here):

• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Everyone should read this! Why has everyone not read this?)
• Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
• Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
• Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
• Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
• Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (warning: look into this before you read it; it is not for everyone)
• Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Hilarious! Read it!)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
• Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
• anything by Marilynne Robinson
• Any others? What can you recommend in this category?

And I don’t even know, so many more! Those are just the ones I happened to think of, that I’ve read recently. So never feel like you have to read Philip Roth, and never feel like you have to not read Philip Roth, either. Read everything! There’s enough great stuff out there for anybody in any kind of mood, is all I’m saying.

(Image via)
__
¹I know, aren’t I tiresome?! If we were at a party, you would have just spotted someone you had to go talk to over there.
²Actually, two of these books (Atmospheric Disturbances and Novel About My Wife) are about men searching for their mysteriously missing (and not actually missing) wives. Weird!

This short novel deals with a surprising number of themes (art, theater, religion, The Troubles, the nature of the self), but to me, it is most interestingly about intimacy, friendship and communication, and about how sometimes a certain distance is essential to a more meaningful and lasting closeness between people.

The story’s narrator is a renowned playwright who has temporarily house-swapped with her good friend, Molly Fox, a famous stage actor. Molly lives in Dublin and the narrator is borrowing her house in order to work on a new play. The action takes place over the course of a single day, Molly’s birthday. Molly herself is in New York, and emphatically does not recognize her birthday, since it is also the anniversary of her mother’s abandonment. The relationships between Molly, the narrator, a third friend, Andrew, and their families are mostly explored through the narrator’s reminiscences throughout the day, but as evening falls, the characters we’ve been introduced to appear in person.

The narrator is a playwright from a big, loving, conventional family she never felt she could truly fit in with. She is closest to her eldest brother, Tom, a Catholic priest. At college, the narrator befriends Andrew, a disgruntled academic who resents his small, vulgar family and his older brother, a Loyalist paramilitary who is later murdered. Later, the narrator meets Molly Fox, who also has a close, complicated relationship with her troubled brother, Fergus.

These three friends are self-contained, undemonstrative people who remain close – but not too close – over the years without really ever acknowledging the nature of their connections. Molly is repeatedly described by everybody as particularly difficult to know (“Molly doesn’t do intimacy.”). She throws out important information and personal confessions at noisy, odd moments, but spends long, quiet evenings revealing nothing at all. The narrator, a playwright, is a keen observer of human nature and spends paragraphs describing the minutiae of any particular interaction while (sometimes hilariously) missing its broader implications entirely.

All the characters are particularly interested in objects – knick-knacks, jewelry, clothing – and these symbols are dwelt on in great detail. People are contained and known entirely through these tokens of their person, even when they themselves are absent. As the narrator wonders upon waking in Molly’s bedroom in the novel’s first pages: “What kind of woman has a saffron quit on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books?”

Thus, Andrew’s brother is contained in a ring. Molly’s house, with its carefully considered tokens, is more expressive about her life than she ever is herself. Andrew comes to know the world through the contemplation of artistic objects, and his own laborious personal transformation is entirely described by the clothes he wears and the way he furnishes his home.

In a representative passage, the narrator is angered by Molly’s ironic purchase of a fiberglass cow because, she says, “What bothered me most about this was that I had thought I knew Molly well. We had been friends for over twenty years now, and with the exception of Andrew, she was the last person I would have expected to go in for this type of whimsy. . . . I wondered why I hadn’t said this to her. I had always thought we knew each other well enough to be completely honest, at least about something as trivial as this.”

After wondering about the saffron quilt and the white linen dressing gown in the scene quoted above, the narrator interrupts herself: “I was reluctant to pursue this line of thought because I suddenly realized that, lying in my bed in London next week, she might do exactly the same thing to me. Given her particular gift she would be able to reconstruct me, to know me much better than I might wish myself to be known, especially by such a close friend.”

“Especially by such a close friend,” “at least about something as trivial as this” … these sort of qualifiers are frequently included as if they would be self-evident to anyone, because these friends respect nothing so much as each other’s space. As the narrator sits with Andrew in the garden at the end of the day, she tells us, “He fell silent again, and as he sat there quietly thinking about all of this, I almost did something extraordinary, something that might have ruined the delicacy of the moment. I almost closed my hand gently over his hand, where it lay resting on the table.”

That she does not do so, and would never do so, is the key to these three people – their reserve is probably the reason for their friendships’ longevity, but, as the narrator perhaps realizes too late, it is also what keeps them from establishing anything more. For the reader, however, it is what makes these people and this novel so interesting, endearing and unique.

View all my reviews

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Henry Green’s most beloved novel focuses on the complicated relationships between the servants of an Irish country house during World War II. At the time of the novel, Ireland is neutral territory, remote from the escalating conflict and mostly abandoned by the English gentry who own homes there. The servants are left alone with their employers’ children, and thus free, they fight, love, ally, steal and work.

Green is a master at painting beautiful pastoral settings and then focusing on the myriad, nagging daily stresses of the people living in them – both in this novel, and in my personal favorite of his novels, Concluding. While the servants at the Tennants’ manor are removed from the horrible war and mostly left alone to do their chores and mind their own affairs, every character in Loving is plagued by innumerable stresses. These are not carefree people. They worry about putting away enough for retirement, they worry about their families back in England, they throw themselves into power struggles, they lie, they steal, they torment each other. They fall ill, they throw tantrums, they emotionally blackmail each other. They deliberate about enlisting, moving, staying put, escaping. They fear the Germans, they fear the IRA.

The best scenes in the novel are those which Green describes carefully in close focus, and where the events occurring are so closely wedded to the setting that one relies entirely on the other – the dovecoat where the children play and the lovers meet, the cavernous gallery where Edith and her charges play a game of blind man’s buff, the eccentric lampman’s saddleroom with the window into the peacocks’ shed where the maids are caught snooping by the butler. The central figures of the novel – the butler, Charley Raunce, and the housemaid, Edith – are clearly made for each other. Both dim and conniving, they negotiate an ever-changing workaday morality all their own – skimming off the top of the house’s finances is only smart, but stealing property is over the line…mostly. Raunce is constant in his affections, but produces a never-ending torrent of unnecessary falsehoods whenever he feels himself cornered or disrespected, and is often suspected of more cunning than he possesses. Edith is ever careful of the feelings of the staff, but tucks away information on them for when she might need it. Innocent and easily scandalized on the surface, she is in fact a master of manipulation, sexual and otherwise. Loving is a novel overshadowed by a great war and made up of many small ones, and in the end, we know that Edith, at any rate, will be among the survivors. And that is as it should be, because in Green’s Britain, the manor is but the playground of the servants.

View all my reviews

…in literature or anything else, unless of course said precocious one’s story turns out to be HORRIBLY DEPRESSING, as in this article about a doomed child author in the 20s.  If you happen to be looking for something to read just now, read that there thing.