Seating Arrangements

A very satisfying read: a cross between Lucky Jim and A Cheerful Day for a Wedding. A WASP-y wedding weekend on  New England island with multiple unpleasant characters bumping off each other. Shipstead has a lovely way with language: a character watches another with "a knife-and-fork-sharpening look of sexual appraisal", an old woman is complaining about the cold in the rehearsal dinner and Winn Van Meter, the bride's family's patriarch tells her "maybe you feel the chill of approaching death."  Tee hee. 

What to do?

Life's Too Short

Despite it's beguiling cover this book wasn't so beguiling. I read 250 pages--- realized there were 250 more---and put it down. I then picked up an actual Victorian mystery Lady Audley's Secret. Hope springs eternal.

Encore Flavia

I am quite fond of these Flavia De Luce mysteries---although how long can she be 11? I think this is the 4th book and she is still 11. I Am Half Sick of Shadows is set at Christmas and another murder happens under her 11 year old nose. Like reading Nancy Drew but a little more sophisticated. Fun.

Lost Memory Of Skin

Oh that Russell Banks! What a fun guy! This is about a bunch of homeless Registered Sex Offenders living under a bridge in Florida. My other favorite was The Sweet Hereafter about a school bus of children that veers off the road and they're all killed. Oh wait! Don't forget Rule of the Bone, about a 14 year old punk who is also homeless and abused and wanted by the police. But he is a great writer and once you get over your gag reflex you can't stop.
The Lost Memory of Skin is quite good told through the eyes of Kid, a pathetic damaged young man who did something stupid once (or twice) and ends up unable to rent an apartment or keep a job and on parole for 10 years with an GPS ankle bracelet. You see the vicious circle of his life---he can't get a job because he has a record, he can't live in town because he can't be within a certain distance of a school zone, he can't get an apartment anyway because he has no money because he can't get a job because he has a record....Banks does highlight the inadequacy of how we deal with criminals once they are back in society.
But Banks seems to have lost some memory on what the topic was and veers off with this very annoying other character the Professor and it goes a bit downhill from there. Surprisingly enough I found myself longing to be back under the bridge in the tents with the sex offenders rather than hurtling around in a van with the Professor. Only Russell Banks could make me want to do that. Shows you how good he is.

Bring Me More Bodies

What I love about Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, is Thomas Cromwell's management style----he and King HenryVIII have a good cop-bad cop thing going on and it works. Henry is the C.E.O. and Cromwell is his Chief of Staff. Henry tires of Anne Boleyn and Cromwell does all the dirty work getting rid of her while Henry runs off to write sonnets to Jane Seymour. I loved this follow up and will now hold my breath till the next one where Cromwell gets downsized.

The Edward St. Aubyn Quintet

Suddenly everyone is talking about Edward St. Aubyn and I had to decide whether the supposed brilliant prose was worth a trip down the Incest and Heroin Addiction Lane. “The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time,”Michiko Kakutani raved in The New York Times.

I decided to take a little step and promptly joined the stampede after Michiko....five books later I emerge gasping at the end of a St Aubyn marathon. Whoa! He is good. Michiko got it right for once. He has a gift for selecting the perfect metaphor. Some examples: A character repeats a phrase just used by someone else he: "hands the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else's used handkerchief",  someone else is described as seeing their car as a refuge, it "was like a consulate in a strange city, and she moved towards it with the urgency of a robbed tourist". The language is so precise and witty and British. He never get's lyrical or fuzzy.

The novels are about a character, Patrick Melrose, at different points in his life. In the first book, Never Mind  he is five, living a very privileged life in the South of France and sexually abused by his father. Fortunately St. Aubyn is not Dorothy Allison or Alice Walker and our noses are not rubbed in it---the fact is awful enough, no colorful descriptions needed and it takes a page and then it is over (at least for the reader).

The second book, Bad News, is reminiscent of Lucky Jim, Patrick Melrose staggering around New York on a colossal coke and heroin binge picking up his dead father's ashes. The third book, Some Hope, finds Patrick sober attending a rather funny house party with Princess Margaret in attendance.  The fourth book, Mother's Milk, is Patrick married with two young children trying to reconnect with his mother in Southern France. The fifth and last book At Last,at the mother's funeral, is a little disappointing to start but in the end provides a very satisfying conclusion.

Not bad.