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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Loners: Eleanor Oliphant & Upstate

27/2/2018

6 Comments

 
Two novels featuring women, scarred by life, who have kept themselves slightly aloof. Of the two, Eleanor Oliphant is the most damaged, but small acts of kindness, along with a crush on a self-centred musician, might bring her out of her shell. Upstate is perhaps more realistic in confronting the difficulty of change, even though, when we first meet Vanessa Querry she’s no longer lonely as she’s fallen in love. Eleanor gets the better therapist; but is either of these women completely fine?

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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Thirty-year-old office worker Eleanor Oliphant is a solitary soul. She spends her weekends with a couple of bottles of vodka and dreads her weekly phone calls from her mother, who appears to be in a secure facility. Her workmates make no attempt to hide their laughter at her expense, but she doesn’t mind. She thinks they’re a load of idiots anyway. But things are changing for Eleanor. She has her eye on a narcissistic musician while Raymond, a colleague from the IT department, seems to want to be her friend. Can she join the real world of “normal” people and would she even want to when she’s completely fine?
 
I cringed when Eleanor begins her makeover with a bikini wax but, fortunately, even though she discovers people are nicer to her when she gets a haircut and camouflages her facial scar, her real transformation comes from inside. Although I might quibble with some of the details (especially the confrontational manner and speed of change), I was heartened to come across a good enough
fictional therapist in contrast to the rogues who practice in some novels. I also enjoyed how Eleanor’s initial contempt for her counsellor and her methods fades over time.
 
Winner of the Costa First Book Award, Gail Honeyman’s debut kicks off with an epigraph on loneliness, although I’d question whether that’s really what this novel is about. Eleanor’s loneliness is constitutional, the result of never having been loved. Given the extent of her childhood damage, the reader can only admire – even as we smile at her gaucheness – her determination to rise above it and be, indeed, completely fine. Although it’s a fine achievement, if I was on the Costa judging panel, I’d have been rooting for
The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times or The Haunting of Henry Twist. Published by HarperCollins, I bought my own copy!


Upstate by James Wood


When she falls down the front steps and breaks her arm, Vanessa’s boyfriend, Josh, fears it might not be accidental. He emails her sister, Helen, in London, who forwards it to her dad, Alan, in Northumberland. He’s never been to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York where forty-year-old Vanessa is a philosophy professor and his business, as a property developer, is in trouble, but he needs to check on his elder daughter. Of the two girls, Vanessa has always seemed the more vulnerable, plagued by depression from her teens. Since Helen, a highflying executive in the music business, is going to be in New York anyway, it makes sense for father and daughter to brave the icy weather to see how she’s really doing.
 
Scattered with gems about the pleasures and tensions of relationships that go back to our very beginnings, literary critic
James Wood’s second novel asks us to consider why some people find living so much harder than others. Do Vanessa’s difficulties stem from nature (she was always an isolated child) or nurture (boarding school, her parents’ bitter divorce in her teens and her mother’s death not long after)? Is introspection (through therapy or the study of philosophy) an asset or barrier against living? The author leaves it for the reader to decide.
 
Personally, I can’t answer without knowing whether or not Vanessa was
left to cry as a baby and how her parents handled the arrival of her sister when she was too young to articulate her fears. It’s a clever touch that Alan seems oblivious of the very thing Vanessa seems to regret about his behaviour (warning her off an early boyfriend because his prospects were poor) and the pressure to be the “easy” child has left Helen feeling equally alone. Nevertheless, Alan’s parenting failures seem relatively minor; where he most lets his daughter down is in his anxiety that therapy will pin the blame on him. So Vanessa seems not to have had enough to help her; despite her parents finding her a child therapist at sixteen. (I had to laugh at their struggle to find someone in Newcastle in 1982 when, beginning my clinical psychology training there the following year, my first placement was at a highly renowned child and adolescent mental health unit providing a wide range of therapeutic interventions.)
 
Seemingly set around ten years ago, the reader will either love or hate the family’s discussions of a future that has come to pass (the digital revolution in music production and distribution; whether America is ready for a black president; whether the annoying term “going forward” will migrate to the UK). It’s a thoughtful novel about family and vulnerability, and the difficulty of helping someone when our own foibles are wound up in theirs. Thanks to Jonathan Cape for my advance proof copy. For another novel about looking for family in upstate New York, see my review of
Hotel on Shadow Lake.

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Tap or click the image for the other reviews I’ve posted this month. How do these 11 books measure up against the targets I set myself earlier this year? I’m counting 6 (target ≥ 50% met) from independent publishers; 0 (target ≥ 25%) BME authors; 1 (below target ≈ 20%) translations; 6 (target ≥ 50% met) by female authors; one potential favourite (Spaceman of Bohemia).

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Norah Colvin link
2/3/2018 12:30:53 pm

I was interested in both these reviews, to see how you weighed up the things you liked or didn't like about each one and how they contributed to your final assessment. Obviously, it takes more than a good therapist to make a good story, but a "bad" therapist gives one no chance. Coming from one who engages in research to portray the reality of the situation, your amusement at the lack of reality amused me also.

Reply
Annecdotist
4/3/2018 12:50:06 pm

I’m glad it raised a smile for you, Norah. I’ve been reviewing some of my posts on fictional therapists lately (in preparation for a possible guesting slot on a therapy blog) and have to admit that sometimes a bad therapist can make for a better story, the less likely you are particularly sensitive in that area. And I’m trying to be a bit less harsh in my criticism – but this one came a bit too close to my real life experience! Had you been in my shoes you might have wondered why I sent his daughter to a boarding school when there are several prestigious private schools in Newcastle for those who go in for that kind of thing. Which makes me think, if Alan didn’t want state education for Vanessa he probably wouldn’t have wanted an NHS therapists either.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
11/3/2018 06:44:36 am

Sometimes we just have to accept fiction as that, and let the inconsistencies flow over us. It would be so much easier if we just didn't notice them!

Annecdotist
12/3/2018 03:26:50 pm

It’s interesting when discussing books in a group to notice how different inconsistencies affect different people. Sometimes it depends on how strong we feel the story is in other regards and sometimes it’s about our personal hobbyhorse. I can’t see myself ever giving up completely on grumbling about unrealistic therapists.

Charli Mills
6/3/2018 01:10:35 am

I always enjoy your reviews that include therapists. Funny that you were a real life therapist at a time and place where a fictional one was sought! Both sound like interesting reads about character transformations.

Reply
Annecdotist
6/3/2018 09:53:42 am

Ha, I’m not sure and Vanessa would have got much help if she’d come to me at that stage in my training. (Although, of course, I did have an excellent supervisor!)

Reply



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