Some books

The Glass House, The Exhibitionist

I think I have read so many books by female novelists who are trying to write like Charlotte Mendelson and clumsily getting it wrong, that when I actually came to read a Charlotte Mendelson novel - the real thing - her writing rang familiarly bad. But it isn’t. It was just that I have been reading such wild grabs at her style, which I have grown used to chucking over my shoulder after three pages, that the style now seems to me to be hackneyed, when it isn’t. It’s like seeing a real Chanel jacket after seeing a slew of fakes and thinking, “How naff.”

Here is an example from Mendelson’s current novel, The Exhibitionist.

“There is still pee on Jess’s fingers from the toilet at the Black Ball. She’d tried to conceal herself with her coat but she’s bound to be on a Dark Web porn site now. Until they see what she was peeing on. It’s in her pocket; the bin was stuffed and foetid, swampy with other women’s secrets. She’d have felt criminal leaving it in that place of drunken ruin, like abandoning a baby where it would be unfound.”

All very intense. But great! Stylish and great. I think it is much-copied, (badly), for a reason. The general plot of The Exhibitionist is this: Ray Hanrahan is a spoilt, narcissistic manchild and once-famous artist, now eclipsed by his more celebrated artist wife. The book is set over the course of a weekend when Ray is due to have is first exhibition of his artwork for 90 years or however long. The whole family returns to the enormous, falling-down house in North London and of course secrets spill out and tensions run high.

A particular problem for me and this book is that it is set in the streets that surround my own house. It is fucking weird to hear streets mentioned that I walk every day, or every other day. “From what street could you see the Royal Free from the end of the garden?” I wondered out loud to Giles. He thought for a moment, “Dartmouth Park Avenue?” We have these sorts of exchanges a lot about this book. For some reason Mendelson has chosen to re-name Dartmouth Park Hill, (I’m assuming it’s DPH), “Brixham Hill”. For me, reading this book is a bit like watching Fleabag, also set on streets right where I live. In once scene Phoebe Waller-Bridge runs down a road and turns right into Croftdown Road where my friend Melissa lives. It’s a total headfuck. But, sorry, utterly irrelevant to you. I just had to get all that off my chest.

Mendelson doesn’t quite have the Diana Evans gift for spinning actual diamonds on strands of gold out of nothing more than straw, but it’s certain that this set up and plot would be dull in another writer’s hands. I particularly love the elaborate description of the revolting, neglected house, with ladybirds living in the curtains and mould everywhere, that a certain sort of bien pensant intellectual person thinks is terribly smart. I know houses like that and I’ve got to say, I think they’re kind of disgusting because I’m the wrong sort of bourgeoise. Still fascinating though.

On to The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a pretty startling memoir about growing up in America the child of two extremely feckless, slightly mad parents. The father is an alcoholic and possibly… I don’t know… bi-polar? I’m not an expert. The mother is some order of rank, weird hippy. The three-then-four children are left to fend for themselves, scavenging in bins for food, setting fire to their clothes while trying to boil hotdogs. You know the drill. It was all absolutely as riveting as these sorts of Oh-my-god memoirs always are, although stories of feckless parents and neglected children do make me extremely angry for a reason I can’t quite articulate. And three quarters of the way through I did feel a little grubby, like a poverty tourist. Even though this is a memoir, it felt faintly exploitative.

Books like this also occasionally make me feel like the bad parent! I know, it’s irrational, but listen: the kids who end up writing these memoirs are always so super-bright, always reading, reading, reading and desperate to go to school and learn and end up award-winning writers or academics, despite having to walk 18 miles to school and back while wearing no shoes and sleeping on rotten mattresses filled with rats etc. Their difficult start always gives them this terrific grit and resolve and I look at my own children, with their freshly-laundered pyjamas and trips to the dentist and think, “Should I rough things up a bit?” Of course, I’m not going to. But it leaves me with a bad feeling. I think that’s something within me, though. Not the fault of the book.

If you enjoyed Educated by Tara Westover, you will like The Glass Castle.

How about you? Read any good books lately? Please tell the group about them in the handy box below.