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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.

TELL ME MORE

What was that all about, then? After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry and Lucky Us by Amy Bloom

4/9/2014

6 Comments

 
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Today I’m reviewing two novels about interpersonal connections that had me struggling to connect with the essence of the story. I’m hoping you can help me untangle why.

The opening of Lucky Us seemed promising:

My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.

She tapped my nose with her grapefruit spoon. “It’s like this,” she said. “Father loves us more, but he’s got another family, a wife, and a girl a little older than you. Her family had all the money. Wipe your face.”

Oh, how that mother had me hooked! She seemed much more resourceful in accommodating to the duplicate family than the poor woman I’d left contemplating the cracks in the ceiling in a recent flash. Would the narrator follow her lead? I wondered. Or would she struggle to adapt, like Mary, in Geoff LePard’s novel-in-a-flash? What I didn’t anticipate was that she would abandon both her daughter and the novel only four pages on. Reader, I was bereft. Rudderless, despite, I now discover, having been warned this would happen by the blurb. (But we don’t pay much attention to blurbs, do we?)

Eva is twelve when she meets Iris, her father’s other daughter. Over the next decade, we follow their fortunes as Iris seeks stardom in the movies in 1940s America and Eva follows in her slipstream. Through the sisters and their various friends, lovers and hangers on, the novel shows us Hollywood hypocrisy, new-money airs and graces, post-war plastic surgery and the internment camps and repatriation of supposed “enemy aliens”. There are even a few scenes on tarot that had me wondering about extending the criteria for my series on fictional therapists. All very interesting and entertaining, related with that touch of humour evident in the section I’ve quoted above, but I felt rootless, longing, despite my general refusal to bow to the law of motivation, for the narrator to have a little more agency, to come out and tell us what she wants. As Charli Mills says, motivation is movement but movement without motivation is passivity. With the lack of a clear narrative arc, Lucky Us resembled memoir or a truth-based story and, in my mind, that’s not necessarily a compliment.

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It didn’t help to recognise that my feelings as a reader mirrored those of the central character, especially as life got progressively harder yet everyone expected her to cope. I wanted to know what linked the disparate events: what was the story about? Perhaps there was something I was unconsciously avoiding, or perhaps I’m just slow, but I got there in the end. This is a novel about survival, about the drive to recreate a family structure when’s original family has been wiped out. The theme is there in the opening, of course; I only wish I’d seen it.

I was drawn to After Me Comes the Flood by John Burnside’s review in the Guardian. A writer of poetic and weirdly disturbing novels, I was happy to go by his recommendation and further encouraged by the novel’s longlisting for the Guardian first book award.

John Cole, a London bookseller without any customers, decides on a whim to drive up to Norfolk to visit his brother. But he never arrives, stopping off instead at a house in the forest where, to his surprise, he seems to be expected. There he remains for the next seven days, occupying the room and wearing the unwashed clothes of his almost-namesake, sharing the daily round with the longer-term residents, an assortment of waifs and strays and refugees of the mysterious St Jude’s, alternating between a sense of belonging and dreadful guilt. John’s headaches, the heatwave and peculiar odours, the curious absence of birds and the isolation of the country house, suggests all is not normal but I struggled to work out quite how abnormal it was intended to be. The odd characters seemed to float through the house like ghosts, becoming realised, not through their actions and interactions, but by the back stories that were gradually revealed. There were mysteries, such as the source of the letters sent to the fragile Alex, but I felt no particular satisfaction in their resolution. As with Lucky Us, my sense, as a reader, of being insufficiently anchored, reflected the characters’ lack of confidence in their own existence:

Sometimes he sat stroking the back of his hand, feeling the slide of skin on skin and wondering if his touch had always been so slight and so brief – surely he’d once felt its ridge and groove in the whorls of his fingertips? He fell to wondering if he were really there at all – here was his hand on the door, here his feet taking turns on the carpet – but what if his place in the world was not secure, like a tooth loosening in its socket? (p134-5)

reminiscent of the theme in In Search of Solace of identity as constructed from others’ perceptions of ourselves.

I understood the title in terms of Alex’s fear of the dam breaking with its parallel in the fear of mental collapse. But this seemed more a novel about groups: the loyalty and lack of questioning of those who are “in” and the twin threats of abandonment by versus loss of individuality within the group.

Thanks to Serpent’s Tail for my review copy of After Me Comes the Flood, which was published on 3 July.

Lucky Us is published today by Granta – thanks to them for my review copy. For other novels set in the same period, see my reviews of Those Who Save Us, I Can’t Begin to Tell You and The Undertaking (coming soon). For another novel I appreciated more in retrospect, see my review of The Long Shadow. For another novel on rebuilding collapsed social structures, come back next week for my review of Station Eleven.



Have you had ever had that experience of struggling to get hold of the essence of a novel you’re reading? Did you manage to access the theme in the end? Comments welcome on any aspect of this post.



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
5/9/2014 05:49:04 am

Hi Anne, As always you amaze me by the breadth of your reading and the depth of your reviews. I am far behind you in the reading of continuous prose, especially fiction; but I always enjoy reading your reviews and the understanding you bring to the books. While I am reading your reviews I am thinking about how they might appeal to me and how I would respond to the issues you raise.
I am an occasional reader of blurbs. Title and cover first, probably blurb and maybe a little on the inside. Reviews such as yours are always great to read because they help with the decision about possible enjoyment, whether or not the book is ever read.
As I am not a book reviewer though, there is one thing I do wonder about: When you are reading to write a review, do you read with 'different eyes' from when you are reading purely for pleasure, or is that a non-event now you are reviewing?

Reply
Annecdotist
5/9/2014 01:09:20 pm

Glad these reviews are working for you, Norah, and especially that you are not put off reading the post by knowing you wouldn't have time to read the book.
That's a good question about whether I read differently for reviews. I'm not entirely sure because it's been such a gradual process, and I actually never planned to do so many reviews, but I think I've probably got more into the habit of asking myself why rather than whether I am/am not enjoying the experience as I read – if I'm going to write a review I'd just take it a bit further by jotting a few notes (though not many). I still choose to read only those books I think I might enjoy, so it's still generally a pleasure.
But you've got me wondering …

Reply
Norah Colvin
6/9/2014 06:10:09 am

Glad to hear you choose only books you will enjoy. Life is too short ... :)

Annecdotist
6/9/2014 08:15:47 am

Only books I THINK I'll enjoy, not quite the same thing.

geoff link
5/9/2014 05:36:03 pm

Your final question had me thinking. I am sure I have had exactly the experience you have described though for the life of me I cannot put my finger on a title. More often it is a case of wondering why a particular book is described as in one genre or achieving something for the reviewer yet it fails to ignite any spark in me. Finkler's Question, the Howard Jacobson Booker prize was the first comedic book to win the Booker since Vernon God Little. Hmm, in my judgement VGL is still the only comedic book to win. There wee no laughs in Jacobson. None. Zip. Bugger all. As an excuse me of Jewish angst it covered all the many bases but of humour there was nary a sight. I accept that humour is more personal a preference than most but even so I will keep thinking about this point because I am bugged by the thought that I know what you mean and can't remember...

Reply
Annecdotist
6/9/2014 08:22:38 am

Hope you manage to get back to me with the novel that got away. Meanwhile, I couldn't get into The Finkler Question but then did enjoy his next one Zoo Time about the absurdity of the writing business which was reflected in something he said in an article on writers and failure which made sense to me http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/annecdotal/7-writers-on-failure

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