Ghostwritten

Isabel Wolff
Ghostwritten

Harper UK, 2014

In the prologue, we learn the background of one of the two main characters of the novel. In 1987, at the English resort Polvarth a young mother has a nice time with her two children, nine-year-old Evie and five-year-old Ted. While the woman flirts with her boyfriend, kids are left to themselves. Brother and sister wander along the beach, catching crabs, climbing over the rocks. When the bell rings for the tea, calling travelers, Evie deliberately ignores the bell and her mother’s callings. The girl continues to walk off the beach, but what happens next, we do not know and can only guess that something happened with a little Ted.

Evie is now 34, and she now calls himself Jennie, a diminutive of Genevieve. Jennie has grown up and became a ghostwriter. She writes books for others, and she likes it. Jennie outlines the specialization of her work on the wedding of her girlfriend. Jennie herself is not married, but has been living with his partner Rick, a primary school teacher. Joining their relationship Jennie and Rick do not hurry to become husband and wife and not too sure about their future together. The problem is that Jennie does not want to have children. This is a key controversy that leads to the fact that the partners are not sure whether they will be together in the near future.

A business proposal from one of the guests from the girlfriend’s wedding gives Jennie a chance to think about the future and to rest from each other. A guest, an elderly man, has an old mother, Klara, who is 80 years old. This woman would like to write a memoir, but she does not know how to approach this. Jennie’s occupation is just perfect for Klara. The son hires Jennie, and she agrees to come to Polvarth to stay at Klara’s for 10 days, to record an interviews with Klara, to read and look through her archive of photographs, to interview friends and relatives. Although return to Polvarth will be painful for Jennie, she wants to overcome her fears.

Ghostwritten is surprisingly well-written fiction that someone may mistakenly call chicklit. If we label chicklit such novel like this, how we should label tens of thousands of other mediocre novels? Isabel Wolff has talent for storytelling and a style attentive to details.

What sets Wolff apart other writers about women is the ability to cut off the excess. Bonding between the interviews with Klara is written competently and accurately. If the characters eat, then we are not tireв with descriptions of all meals. If Jennie should interview, the author proceeds directly to the interview, cutting stylistic garbage as the heroine went to the cottage of his client, as she set up the recorder and so on. Jennie's storyline is not too long, and someone might be disappointed by the fact that Jennie’s secret is revealed after two-thirds of the book. This reduces the emotional intensity, even if we will have another secret in the finale.

We have to admit that the two storylines of the novel is not quite equal to the density of detail, but this was to be expected. What can be compared with the years of life in a concentration camp? Not much really. Nevertheless, Jennie and Klara are intriguing leads, although there had been a tragic childhood for Klara, her further life seems like a safe ride without problems.

Life of prisoners in Java Wolff studied hard, at least there no obvious blunders in the story of Klara. Jennie’s story raises only one question, namely in the publishing area. Wolff subtly avoids publishing details about Klara’s memoirs. For whom did Jennie write Klara’s book? Wil it be self published by the old lady? Or she found the publisher? The author does not give the answers, in the finale only to mention that the book has already been published.

And yet Ghostwritten has distant relationship with commercial literature. The story of each heroine of the novel is interesting in itself, and yet Wolff is satisfied with that and calculates her story. She brings these stories into one. By some coincidence, Klara and Jennie have a similar tragedy from the past. Wolff just needs this resonance between the two heroines, as if she is afraid that it would not be enough, that the reader won’t feel these stories by themselves. But the reader doesn’t need this artificiality in the whole story.

Isabel Wolff writes smoothly, sometimes elegant, above average. The entire novel is written very smoothly, without failures. And it just happened so that the strongest part of the novel is its prologue. Ten pages of some unearthly beauty. And the rest of the novel is trying to reach out to this prologue, but fails. Wolff set too high bar for herself in the prologue. It would have passed for a brilliant short story. Still, it’s a good novel. But only good, not great.

The Pure Gold Baby

Margaret Drabble
The Pure Gold Baby

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013

London, early 1960s. Young anthropologist Jess has an affair with a married professor. The affair leads to pregnancy, childbirth of a pretty girl Anna, but the birth of the child in turn leads to a parting with the professor.

Jess keeps the child, explains the situation to the parents, and they generally understand their daughter. Jess in London is surrounded by intellectuals, scholars, poets, TV presenters, young professionals like herself. In her neighborhood Jess is getting acquainted to other young mothers, they walk together with children, take them into the kindergarten. The story is narrated by one of Jess’ friends, Eleanor, a lawyer, now retired. She recalls their youth and tries himself as a writer. Eleanor lived her whole life side by side with Jess. The narrator will notice the difference between 60s and 70s and 2000s.

About The Pure Gold Baby it can be said that this book is heartfelt, but not concentrated. Lying in the heart of the novel the story of a mother and daughter is very touching and humane. Fragile Jess is hardly a strong woman. Nevertheless, she took a strong decision to take care of a sweet but mentally retarded daughter, the pure gold baby from the title. Jess brought up Anna alone without relying on help from someone. All the men in her life were just lovers, romantic interests, flashes of passion, but not the breadwinners, fathers, defenders. Jess alone guarded Anna, making the daughter entirely dependent on her. But Jess herself, unwittingly, has become dependent on her daughter. Jess almost deprived herself of a life - career and possible lasting relationship with a man - for the sake of her daughter. But we can assume that Jess was just afraid to start over, afraid to alienate Anna, let into her life more fresh air.

On the background of relations between Jess and Anna, we read about the changes in England. Real estate prises have risen, manners softened, diet and nutrition appeared. The whole structure of psychiatric institutions changed. State and private investors began to create special schools for people with developmental problems. In place of a madhouse with notoriety came a fashionable clinic, where they began to treat nervous breakdowns and drug addictions. Money of higher classes, suffering from mental health problems, flowed into the clinic.

Drabble on behalf of the narrator then makes digressions from a central plot to insert a reference on Livingstone, television, science, art and so on. These are clever arguments, although they still remain digressions – adding almost nothing to the story.

In addition to the main group of characters the narrator Eleanor focuses on the fate of Jess’ friends, especially to those with whom she was familiar from the hospital. These disgressions are overrepetitious, and none of the supporting characters are really interesting to read about him or her a dozen pages. In fact the entire second half of the novel is more about old acquaintances of Jess, than about her. Anna’s and in some respects Jess’ lives remains static, respectively Eleanor tries to fill this static with the stories. The novel loses his focus, although the end is rather good.

Drabble writes lyrical prose (but without the usually amorphousness), I wish it were more focused. If we return to the title: this is not gold, rather silver.

A Bad Day for Sorry

Sophie Littlefield
A Bad Day for Sorry

Minotaur, 2009

Stella Hardesty is already over fifty and she is a widow. Stella killed her husband, once struck him on the head. Ollie, a husband, constantly drank and beat Stella up, but one day her patience came to an end. Stella didn’t go to prison, and to deal with husbands Hardesty made her profession. On weekdays, Stella keeps sewing shop, and she does freelance jobs on the weekends. Clients, women from the neighborhood, complain to Stella about their husbands or boyfriends if those use their fists , and Stella has serious conversations with ne’er-do-well husbands, explaining why it is not good, to beat and mock their own wives. If husbands do not heed verbal warnings, Stella with fists and other punishment tools hammers in negligent men lesson of obedience. Typically it helps. That is just business.

One client of Stella, a young mother Chrissy Shaw, however, is faced with the situation that is more complicated: her brute husband Roy Dean did not let up after numerous warnings and kidnapped Chrisy’s young son Tucker. Stella needs as soon as possible to find the boy and his kidnapper who are in trouble with the law, and apparently even made friends with the local mob.

Stella Hardesty is a breath of fresh air after a homogeneous mass of similar heroines of semi-criminal novels written by women. Stella is far from the typical heroine of today's women's environment: she is not young, does not wear a short skirt and high heels, is able to handle a weapon, and her main occupation is not sitting in the office where the nearest to a crime that can happen is if someone throws on someone a glass of water at the cooler.

Stella doesn’t have time to sit on her bum, she works two jobs, and not for the sake of money, she doesn’t have a plentiful of children: the one and only daughter does not talk to her mother after Stella chastised her for shacking up with an ex-con. Hardesty is trying for a universal, and especially a woman's, justice.

«Early in her justice-delivering career, the thought of being suspected of favoring kinky sexual practices was intensely embarrassing, especially since the source of the rumors came about for only the most practical reasons. Being five feet six, overweight, and out of shape, Stella had managed to pull a muscle in her lower back the first time she tied up a recalcitrant jerk at gunpoint. She almost shot him by accident as she staggered around, yelping in pain. There was also the fact that the knot-tying skills she learned in Girl Scouts weren't up to the task: the same guy, as Stella waved the gun around wildly, managed to get his wrists free. It was only slightly reassuring that he immediately fell over as he tried to run away, having forgotten that his ankles were still bound.

Stella realized she had to make some changes. She started a fitness program, but she knew she also needed to find a more reliable way to subdue a man. She had a vague notion of learning some paramilitary restraint techniques that might rely more on finesse than brute force, but Google searches for words like restraint and shackle kept popping up bondage sites.»

A Bad Day for Sorry is the first book in the series, with a touch of pulp fiction and lively plot, flavored with salty language and like running-into-the-problems style.