crooked house

The Christmas Books by Dickens (White's Books Edition)

It seems to me that if you're going to spring for an actual book instead of an electronic edition, you might as well buy the most beautifully designed one you can find. (Perhaps that's the silver lining in this publishing revolution -- actual, physical books are going to have to get even more beautiful in order to survive.) Here's a gorgeous version of  Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol and Other Stories by Dickens. This has cloth covers with gold foiling in the little windows. You can view the entire piece of artwork, which covers front, spine, and back at the very end of this blogpost by the Caustic Cover Critic -- that site is worth exploring -- or at the website of the artist, Joe McLaren.

The Irrestistible Henry House

Sometimes you read the description of a book and you know you have to have it, no matter what the reviews say.* Author Lisa Grunwald was inspired to write The Irresistible Henry House when she happened upon these photos of Bobby Domecon on Cornell's website. Bobby Domecon was a practice baby who lived in a practice apartment at the university, where he was mothered by a rotation of Domestic Economics students for at least the first year of his life. Apparently there were many such practice babies, plucked from orphanages, at many universities throughout the states for around 40 years, until research in the 1960s began to demonstrate that infants needed to attach to a primary caregiver in order to develop normally. Grunwald wondered about how the babies raised this way would have fared later in life and her novel is an exploration of one such fictional baby's life. The first part of the book, about Henry's early childhood, his real mother, and the head of the practice baby program, is riveting. The later sections, in which Henry grows up and become an animator for Disney (working on the Mary Poppins movie) and then moves to London to work on Yellow Submarine, wander a little -- Grunwald obviously did a lot of research on the era and you can sometimes see the seams -- but the book is more than worth a read. It made me curious about the lives of the actual, real-life practice babies. I did some googling and discovered only a proposal for a documentary film about them, nothing more.

Of course, the children who stayed in orphanages would certainly be likely to develop attachment disorders as well. What makes the case of the practice babies so interesting is that they were considered to be superior candidates for later adoption because they were being raised using all the latest, most scientific methods and techniques.

Grunwald lists some of the books she read while she writing Henry. I've added the following ones to my own to-read list:

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

 Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children

 Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

Dr. Spock: An American Life

Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession

*Most reviews of this book are mixed but tend toward the positive. I was surprised to read both a very negative and a very positive review of the book in The New York Times. I'm not sure what the point of this is -- while it was probably a relief to Grunwald to have such a great review follow such a bad one, surely there are so many books that deserve attention that the editors should have been loath to devote so much space to one book.

What We Found When We Went Looking for Wild Things

Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez perform his hit song.

Luke and his dad saw the movie on Sunday. They loved it. We finished the book (wow, check out that price) last night. We loved it. Now we're in search of more, more, more. I'm really excited about the fact we were able to read a novel together at bedtime -- and open to suggestions for the next one we should try.

Luke has added a Wild Things stuffed animal to his Christmas list. He wants Alexander, the goat boy creature. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is such a thing. The child is very persistent in these matters, insisting that, if I would just agree to telephone Santa and ask nicely, surely he would direct his elves to make one.

Babies in Literature Series: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

The Darmstadt Madonna by Hans Holbein, whose paintings are mentioned in Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall traces the career of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's closest advisor for a time. The book is written in the close third person, and we are led to assume that Cromwell  is about as pleased with the birth of a girl child to Queen Anne as was Henry himself. Which is to say, not very. There are two descriptions of the infant Elizabeth that are amusing. Here is Cromwell's first view of her:

The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, 'It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.'

   'In the capacity of ...?' The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw and is cannibalising herself.

   'In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.'

   The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is picked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, 'I think she was hungry.'

You'll have to read the book for the other description. And you'll want to -- it is excellent. My only quibble is that, at 650 pages, it isn't quite long enough. I was willing to follow Cromwell to his death. If you need more convincing, check out Levi Stahl's terrific review.

How I Became a Famous Novelist

I need to get my hands on a copy of How I Became a Famous Novelist, which is reviewed here and excerpted here. He had me at the ad line "Blood is the new pink" and only reinforced the deal with "I wear jeans daily because jeans can double as a napkin." Never mind the following premise for a thriller: "A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost 11th commandment that changes everything."

The book has its own Facebook page, where you can find a bunch of extra content, including a page where you can add your own titles to the fake New York Times bestseller lists.

First in a Series: Babies in Literature

Two perfect descriptions of a baby, from Elizabeth Taylor's The Soul of Kindness:

[Flora, the baby's mother] began to dredge Alice with powder. Then she pinned her into clean napkins and handed her to her grandfather. She went out with the wet napkins... A long string of dribble swayed from Alice's mouth and attached itself to his shoulder. Her head bobbed uncertainly on its frail neck. He was afraid that she might nod it right off. Some talcum powder came off her legs onto his sleeve. With both hands needed to hold her, he could not protect himself. He kept his head back, rigid, as far from her as he could, but her face came nearer and nearer and with a sudden lurch she fell forward, her wet, open mouth pressed slobberingly against his chin.

And:

[Richard, the baby's father] bounced Alice on his knee and a thread of milk ran down her chin. Her eyes goggled and she belched; then she smiled at him, showing her two front teeth. Well, she can be sure of me, he thought. Until the day I die. And I'll see that everything she has is a damn sight better than anybody else's.
Being a parent sets mirrors around one, so that one can catch an oblique, surprising glimpse of other people, even of their previous lives. Richard suddenly saw his father as a young man, full of ambitious plans for his son, and he wondered if he, Percy, had ever danced his child on his knee, hurried home from work to do so; if he had felt this fierce protectiveness. It was one of the strangest ideas Richard had ever had, and it made him uneasy.

I'm planning to do a series of these descriptions of babies from literature -- it'll be interesting to see if we can tell which authors actually had children, or at least some experience with them, or not. If you can think of a particularly good or bad description of a baby from a work of literature, please do email me or comment.

Parents in Literature: William French and Berthea Snark in Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions

I've been feeling under the weather and attempting to shake myself out of it with homemade chicken noodle soup (homemade, unfortunately, by me) and Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions. There are a couple of hilariously fraught relationships between parents and their adult children in this serial novel. The "aspirationally forty-something" William French is having trouble getting his grown son Eddie to move out on his own: 

"Yes," he said. "Eddie is twenty-four now and I have been thinking about helping him to move on. There was that place in Kentish Town . . . "

"You told me about that," said Marcia. "The one that had no kitchen and a front door at a forty-five degree angle."

"Yes. Not the best of places. But he could have made something of it."

"But didn't."

William sighed. "No. He didn't." He turned and met Marcia's stare. "Look, Marcia, Eddie may have his little failings but he is my flesh and blood, you know . . . "

She held up a hand. "Of course he is. Of course. And as his father you love him dearly. I know that."

William turned back to the coffee. Did he love Eddie dearly? Would it be possible for anybody to love Eddie dearly? William's late wife had done so, but that was because she was his mother. Every mother loves her son dearly – or should. Even after the son has done something egregiously terrible – tried to shoot the Pope, or something equally awful – the mother would still love him. There had been that man, of course, who had shot the Pope; what must his mother have thought? Perhaps it would depend on whether the mother was Catholic or not, thought William. A Catholic mother might find her maternal affection stretched if her son did something like that. But then again, she would have remained his mother and might have argued, "Well, dear, you must have had your reasons . . . "

A few chapters later, Berthea Snark, the mother of MP Oedipus Snark, puts the lie to that notion -- she can't stand her own son and is writing his unauthorized biography.

Of course, as you all know by now, if my son shot the Pope I'd probably post photos of the adorable event right here on the blog.

 

The Telegraph is challenging readers to try to keep up with McCall Smith by writing their own serialized online novels in twenty weeks.

Randall Jarrell's Definition of The Novel

Randall Jarrell on the novel: 

...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

From his introduction to Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, one of the books on my list of classics not of but about childhood. Here's the context:

There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

But The Man Who Loved Children has been a queer exception. I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see there were things wrong with it -- a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it -- but they felt that, somehow, the things didn't matter.

To have this happen with a book that was a failure to begin with, and that after twenty-five years is still unknown, is strange. Having it happen has helped me to believe that it is one of those books that their own age neither reads nor praises, but that the next age thinks is a masterpiece.

But I suppose I'd believe this even if every borrower had told me it was bad. As Wordsworth and Proust say, a good enough book in the long run makes its own readers, people who believe in it because they can't help themselves. Where The Man Who Loved Children is concerned, I can't help myself; it seems to me as plainly good as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past are plainly great. A few of its less important parts are bad and all of its more important parts are good: it is a masterpiece with some plain, and plainly negligible, faults.

I call it a good book, but it is a better book, I think, than most of the novels people call great; perhaps it would be fairer to call it  great. It has one quality that, ordinarily, only a great book has: it does a single thing better than any other book has ever done it. The Man Who Loved Children makes you a part of one family's immediate existence as no other book does.