Cities are better for working mothers

I've belatedly come across a grippingly interesting--and most disturbing, though also very useful--article about feminism and work by Linda Hirshman in the American Prospect Online, "Homeward Bound":

Here's the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, 'A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.'

The critics are right about one thing: Dopey New York Times stories do nothing to change the situation. Dowd, who is many things but not a political philosopher, concludes by wondering if the situation will change by 2030. Lefties keep hoping the Republicans will enact child-care legislation, which probably puts us well beyond 2030. In either case, we can't wait that long. If women's flourishing does matter, feminists must acknowledge that the family is to 2005 what the workplace was to 1964 and the vote to 1920. Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed with language of choice.

Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules -- rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.

There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.

And here's Rebecca Traister at Salon responding to David Brooks's NYT piece in response to Hirshman, which I haven't read but which sounds completely maddening. (Thanks to Bitch PhD for the links.)

Mark Thwaite interviews Peter Davidson

at ReadySteadyBook about his amazing-sounding book The Idea of North, something I think I must get as soon as possible. First they talk about the "real" north--the "sophisticated urbanity which can coexist with remoteness" in the far north of Scotland, say, or Norway--and then Thwaite asks Davidson about Zembla. This is Davidson's answer:

Zembla is an imaginary Scandinavian/Russian kingdom, the obsessionally-detailed fantasy of the delusional narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire, who believes that he is the ex-King of Zembla, exiled in the United States. Of course the strategy of the novel is that it makes the northern fantasy land much more real, more detailed and more interesting, than the �real� reality of the American college town where the action takes place.

Zembla even has a language: made up, of course, but historically credible as a marginal Scandinavian tongue. I live in a household much given to languages, and we realised that Nabokov has given enough hints in the novel that (a crazy thing for any sane adult to do) you can even guess what the Zemblan word would be for things that aren't mentioned in the novel at all.I was just wondering this morning how many people worldwide who know a bit about the history of language have walked into Nabokov's trap and started inventing more Zemblan, beguiled by the remembered Zembla of the novel which is so concentrated, so persuasive, that it is almost possible to treat it (in however sophisticated a game with words) as real.

Schoolteacher noir

doesn't exactly sound like a compliment, and yet I've just read a great female noir novel that will delightfully define that subgenre for me henceforth--it's Megan Abbott's absolutely brilliantly well-written Southern California 1950s noir, Die a Little. Cool, clinical, dark, and really exceptionally well-put-together sentences. Also a really vicious ending. Great stuff.

Then I read a book by an author I am PERPLEXED I have never heard of, it is so much the kind of thing I like; I think it must be one of those weird US/UK publishing/taste divides. In Your Dreams, by Tom Holt. It's a bit Neverwhere-ish (now THAT was a book that just blew me away, I grabbed it at the public library--must have been in New Haven still at that point--without really looking at it, not knowing who Neil Gaiman was at all, then sat up STARTLED once I'd read the first page at how good it was and raced through it poised with delight), this is more whimsical and gentler in its funniness than either Gaiman or Terry Pratchett (or Diana Wynne Jones, it's got a bit of that feel though), but I was definitely won over after initial wariness-of-whimsy phenomenon & have just stayed up till all hours to finish it. It's a sequel, and there's a new one about to come out that makes up a trilogy; good near-future light reading....

Good things at the Guardian

I find this one of the most consistently amusing and thought-provoking sources of book news; especially good stuff this week, including a fantastic essay by James Campbell about Richard Wright's unpublished last novel, another fascinating excerpt from John Fowles' journals (in one entry Harold Pinter is taken--by a member of the crew for French Lieutenant's Women--to be a secondhand car salesman) and Pankaj Mishra on the writer's fantasy of room service

Lorin Stein has a very good essay on Mary Gaitskill

in the latest New York Review of Books. It's not available online (one day I am going to steel myself and pay the extra $20 required to have full electronic access in addition to my print subscription, but that day has not yet come, mostly because on principle it strikes me as completely outrageous--it's ridiculous, I actually have the print one as a gift subscription, so I should just suck it up and pay, but can't bring myself to...), but Alice Boone offers a thoughtful and interesting blog post about it that includes some excerpts.

The last part of Stein's essay is particularly effective, as he discusses the way that Gaitskill takes abstractions--"old-fashioned words like pity and compassion"--and "[tests] them against the complexity of her characters' inner lives." He gives my favorite passage from Veronica, in which Alison tells the story of her friend Veronica's "coarse and sentimental stories," including one about "being raped by a man who broke into her apartment" that includes the line (Veronica's line) "'My rapist was very tender.'" This is Alison's commentary:

Smart people would say she spoke that way about the story because she was trying to take control over it, because she wanted to deny the pain of it, even make herself superior to it. This is probably true. Smart people would also say that sentimentality always indicates a lack of feeling. Maybe this is true, too. But I'm sure she truly thought the rapist was tender. If he'd had a flash of tenderness anywhere in him, a memory of his mother, of himself as a baby, of a toy, she would've felt it because she was desperate for it. Even though it had nothing to do with her, she would've sought it, reaching for it as it sank away in a deep pool. I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing---

Here was my original post about the novel, if you didn't catch it first time round.

This whole cat family tree thing

is very cool; it's Nicholas Wade's story DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution in the New York Times:

Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.

'Good' writing about 'bad' behavior

So it turns out that Allan Gurganus's introduction to Heather Lewis's last novel, "Terror, Eros and Animal: The Fiction of Heather Lewis," is available online (and well worth a look, I have just read it with huge interest) at ReadySteadyBook - a literary site; many thanks to Mark Thwaite for the link.

The kind of pain that kills pain

I've just finished reading the most extraordinary novel, House Rules by Heather Lewis. I have a strong stomach, but it's really stomach-turningly disturbing, and one of the best novels I've ever read. Talk about female noir. . . . Flattened-out first-person narration, teenage girls, show-jumping, absolutely brutal sex scenes (some of the most disturbing but also erotic I've ever come across), cigarettes and bourbon and doping (horses and people): this book will not suit everyone (I was not exaggerating above, it literally made me feel sick to my stomach, it's that intense), but the combination of writing and sensibility is quite remarkable.

I've been meaning to read Lewis for a while now, Pete Ayrton of Serpent's Tail told me about her first and then Dale Peck's piece in New York Magazine (click on that link in part for the really amazing photograph of Lewis) compounded my sense that this was a writer I would particularly like. And here's an interesting short piece by Charlie Dickinson about her novel Notice (published posthumously by Serpent's Tail in 2002, following Lewis's death by her own hand at age forty).

I was reminded of two other particularly favorite novels of mine with roughly comparable subject matter (and both--like this one--written to the highest possible standard of language), Jenny Diski's Nothing Natural (which I picked up in the bookstore at Heathrow without having heard anything about it--it just caught my eye--and then was consumed by on the flight back to New York, it was one of the most intense reading experiences of my entire life) and Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby.

I must get Heather Lewis's other two novels as soon as possible (The Second Suspect is the other one, published second but written third). Though first I had better read something more morally uplifting and cheery, this is not wise January reading (especially as I have done exceptionally well and not smoked a single cigarette since the first weekend in September, and it is hard to imagine a more cigarette-smoking-inducing writer than Lewis). . . .

English words that can be spelled

in the symbols of the periodic table (26812 of them) at the excellently named "Nandor's Exhaustive Chemical Words Page". Link via Language Log / MetaxuCafe. Bonus literary links: Primo Levi's The Periodic Table (one of the best books ever written, a must-read if you haven't already read it); Michael Gordin's A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitri Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Period Table (I haven't read this, but I meant to get it when it first came out, and must get hold of it now I've been reminded).

Wendy Lesser on Julian Barnes

in Slate (it's a generous & persuasive little essay, I must get that Barnes book, I have always felt rather the same way about him but this one sounds remarkably good and Lesser is someone whose judgment I trust):

There is a peculiar pleasure that comes to a critic who has badly underestimated the capacities of a particular novelist. Peculiar, because one hates to look like a fool; but pleasure, because it is always good to find the number of excellent novels in the world enlarged. With his new book, Arthur & George, Julian Barnes has increased that tally by one, and I am left feeling suitably chastened by my failure to foresee this turn of events. (But before I proceed with my mea culpa, a quick caveat emptor: To champion Barnes, I can't help giving away the plot. So, click away now if you're planning to read Arthur & George, and come back when you're done.)

There's a particularly funny/awful "digested read"

up at the Guardian, John Crace "digesting" The Angry Island - Hunting the English by AA Gill: "As I lazily started yet another chapter with boring reflections on myself before expanding into egregious and specious space-filling generalisations, I thought about voice. How odd that I - a Scot - should speak in the repressed anger of Received Pronunciation when even the Queen is moving towards Estuary ..."

Two more books

by Graham Joyce, neither nearly as good as the one I blogged about below. The first was The Stormwatcher (a book whose spine annoyingly gives the title incorrectly, so that I at first looked for "The Stormwatch" and didn't find it); even more annoyingly, I really had read this one before, or rather had it from the library and read the beginning and ending but skipped the middle b/c of it not really being my kind of book. This time I read it properly through, there are things to like but it's slight. And then I read Indigo, which was the one other one I'd got from the library; but it wasn't my kind of thing at all, too mystical. I must get all his other books, though, I am sure at least a couple of them are as good as The Tooth Fairy.

The good thing is that I've now had a really substantial dose of excessive novel-reading and can go back to work tomorrow with the light reading impulse temporarily sated; it is good to have a holiday occasionally. . . .

Quagga-breeding

D. T. Max in the Times Magazine:

The quagga was a horselike animal native to southern Africa that went extinct in 1883. Its head, neck and shoulders and sometimes the forward part of its flank were covered with stripes; the back part of its torso, its rump and legs were unstriped. An old joke among the Dutch, the first Europeans to settle in South Africa, was that the quagga was a zebra that had forgotten its pajama pants. Rau's goal, which he has been working toward for three decades, is to breed the quagga back into existence. His approach is to take zebras that look more quaggalike than the norm and mate them with one another, generation after generation, progressively erasing the stripes from the back part of their bodies.

Oh my god, I have just read the most perfect novel

and it is The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce. I can't believe how good it was. Indescribable, but a bit like what you'd get if you asked Alan Garner to rewrite Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club. The opening scene is one of the best I've ever read. And I want a Nightmare Interceptor!

Someone recently recommended this book to me, which was why I got it at the library on Thursday, but I can't for the life of me remember who. If it was you, PLEASE tell me in the comments so I can thank you properly! And in fact I also had a strong and uncanny feeling as I was reading the book that I'd read it before. I am sure this isn't the case, it was published in 1996 and in any case it is such a good novel it's inconceivable I could have read it and not remembered . . . hmmm. Maybe it just has that mythic-and-you-could-swear-something-like-this-happened-to-YOU-as-a-child kind of feel; also it is so perfect in every sentence that it comes at you more like a landscape than a work of art. Very interesting and surreal effect. I am reading all his other books IMMEDIATELY, unfortunately I only got one other one from the library but this stuff is completely addictive.

(Sara Ryan also has a Graham Joyce fixation. Maybe that's where I saw it. But actually I am positive someone recommended it to me directly . . . clearly my memory is disintegrating under the influence of this most peculiar and excellent novel.)

The other book I started reading last night & finished this afternoon was something of a disappointment, Denise Hamilton's The Jasmine Trade. I could see why she's gotten so much positive attention, there are some very good things about the book--good journalistic-political LA stuff, for instance, and much-above-average sentence-writing--I got all 4 of the series out of the library--but by about halfway through I was unfortunately in serious doubt as to whether I should even finish it. I don't really care about plotting in itself, but if you are going to attempt to write a realistic private-investigator novel you just CAN'T have such patently absurd plot points. And the other thing was that I had an unprecedented dislike for the main character/narrator. Either the portrait is psychologically implausible or else Eve Diamond is a total nightmare. The thing that finally did it for me was when Eve goes for a run with her neighbor's dog Bon Jovi, is followed by 2 Chinese gang members in a fake UPS truck & then shot at. They hit the dog. She drags the dog's body into a toolshed, then walks home after the assassins have fled. There is NO description of what she does with the dog's body after that. She goes to the cops, goes home and goes to sleep, talks to various people on the phone, and only THEN remembers "suddenly that I would have to break the news about Bon Jovi to [the neighbor]." Maybe I'm a crazy person, but don't you think that she would have called the neighbor FIRST THING to tell her the dog was dead? And suggested that, you know, she should go and retrieve the body from the shed before someone found it and freaked the hell out? I realize this is an odd thing to fixate on, but the book is full of stuff like this. Not so much my kind of thing.

James Fenton on Johnson and modern biography

in the Guardian. Broadly speaking, it's a response piece to a new edition of Johnson's life of Richard Savage, edited by Richard Holmes (I'm not sure if this is available in the US or not; I've linked to the Amazon page, which gives an Oct. 31, 2005 publication date, but it's also giving the "Out of print-limited availability" message).

This HarperCollins series is fun, though; I was just reading the Defoe on Sheppard and Wild one a few months ago, though I believe that life of Jonathan Wild may have been "deattributed"--but the question of what Defoe did and didn't write is irretrievably murky....