Friendship by Emily Gould (2014)

Emily Gould is Internet famous and she had a famous Internet meltdown. The thing about being Internet famous, though, is that while one may be ridiculously well known in one's own corner of the world wide web, the Internet is so niche that only the others who hang out where you do will know who you are (a case in point is the Yarn Harlot, a woman so Internet famous that her simply knitting a pattern can cause its popularity to sky rocket and whole colourways of yarn to sell out but who is virtually unknown outside the knitting blogosphere). Obviously Emily Gould and I reside in different parts of the Internet because it is only recently that I discovered who she is - a blogger who wrote for Gawker who got given a lot of money to write a book which then bombed and the stories within it caused rifts with her friends and family.

This knowledge about Emily Gould is fundamental to an understanding of her first adult novel, Friendship. In this book, Amy is an Internet famous person who had a famous Internet meltdown. She is now the editor of Yidster, a blog with "a modern Jewish focus" and a small but loyal readership, which is slowly and steadily losing money. Amy hates her job but it only involves about 15 minutes of actual work per day and she is too lethargic to do anything about finding a better job. Beth is a midwestern transplant who is back in New York after disastrously moving to Wisconsin for love. She is paying back an immense student loan debt from the one year she completed of a two-year MFA program. She is temping and struggling to make ends meet. This book chronicles the ups and downs of their friendship after Beth becomes pregnant after one night stand and Amy is forced to address the realities of her life.

Emily Gould is a very good writer. I read this book in one sitting, while my cat basked in the sun next to me. This is super rare for me to do and an indication of how easy the book is to read. I think the book also really captures well the dynamics of intense female friendship. However, these characters are incredibly and profoundly irritating. They make really stupid decisions really often, they seem completely unable to inhabit a financial and practical reality and they act with a truly breathtaking talent for self-destruction. The plot is frankly a bit stupid, particularly Beth's decision to scrimp on the $40 the morning-after pill would cost and the entire Sally plotline.

My cat, keeping me company and lying in the sun

For me, this book feels a lot like the TV show Girls (a comparison that I am sure Emily Gould quite consciously cultivated). It focuses on a bunch of women who feel entitled to a life they can't afford and bewildered that life isn't turning out like they thought it would. These women are obnoxious, bratty and, for anyone with actual real problems, incredibly frustrating. But they are also entertaining and funny and very watchable. Emily Gould's online person is ridiculously self-involved and self-centred and the characters she created are also but she is a good writer. Your ability to enjoy this book will completely depend on your tolerance of Gould and her characters unrelenting self-absorption. Three stars.

One more thing: paying $60,000 for an MFA will not make you a writer. It is only through the act of writing that one becomes a writer. Invest that $60,000 in making sure you have the time and space to write rather than supporting the exploitative idea that an MFA is a thing of actual value.

Fiona's Flame by Rachael Herron (2014)

Fiona's Flame takes us back again to the warm and comfortable streets and beaches of Cypress Hollow, where the dear departed master knitter Eliza Carpenter's words provide a crafy backdrop to the  action that takes place in the narrative. This fourth installment focuses on the romantic travails of the lovely Fiona Lynde. Not a knitter, Fiona is a mechanic who owns and runs Fee's Fills (the local garage) and makes jewellery from vintage car scraps. She has had a serious crush on the gorgeous Abe Atwell ever since she saw him rescue a kitten from a mailbox but hasn't spoken to him for years. Abe has been firmly off the market since he was left at the alter nine years ago, focusing instead on being harbourmaster and developing his whale-watching business. Their worlds collide when their development plans for the local lighthouse differ. Fiona wants it demolished and turned into an accessible park; Abe wants it restored and turned into a museum.

As the novel progresses, we find out that Fiona and Abe are in different ways driven by their pasts. Abe's father, who was much loved by Abe and Abe's mum, died in a boating accident. The lighthouse was a special place for Abe's father and it is there that each year Abe and Abe's mother celebrate his memory. When Fiona was young, she lived in the lighthouse with her father and alcoholic mother, and has only sad memories of the place. Will they be able to resolve their differences and, at the same time, deal with the ghosts of their past?

This is a romance novel, so of course they will, but not until after the requisite misunderstandings and make-ups have occurred. As with all of Herron's books, there are nice secondary characters and a good sense of place. This book is an enjoyable visit to a familiar, comfortable place.

I have two minors quibbles the book though. My first the random explicit language. For example, Fiona and her friend Daisy are discussing the cuteness of Abe's friend Zeke and Daisy drops into conversation how she "get[s] wet" when guys talk about budgets on dates. Obviously it's part of a joke between Fiona and Daisy but the phrase is really out of context with the gentleness of both the genre and the conversation. (I should note here that I had the exact same criticism about her last book, so it's clearly an author quirk, but I don't like it. Not because it's explicit, but because it's jarring because it feels so out of context). Secondly, I wish there were at least one LGBT character. But these are very minor concerns, so please don't let them put you off.

A nice, quick easy read. Three stars.

The Bat by Jo Nesbo (1997, translated to English in 2012)

Do you remember the time about 10 years ago when everyone was reading Steig Larssen? Everywhere one looked - on the train, in cafes, on the bookshelves of friends and relatives - there sat at least one but often all three of the Millenium Trilogy. Then, just as suddenly, everyone moved on from the Larssen books and I somehow ended up with about five full sets given to me by well-meaning friends who knew I loved books and therefore thought I would fully appreciate the books they had enjoyed so much. 

Well, lately my friends and family seem to be doing the exact same thing with the Jo Nesbo Harry Hole novels. I have five of them sitting on my 'To Read' shelf (yes, I have a 'to read' shelf which is in a separate location to the rest of my books. I only have enough room for one bookshelf in my small apartment so only really special books that I want to re-read are kept. It's a hard but fair system.). I  decided that if I was going to do the series, I'd do it properly, so I started from the start and borrowed The Bat from the library.

Written in 1997, The Bat is the first Harry Hole mystery. However, it was not translated into English until 2012, after about eight other Hole mysteries had been translated and very popularly received. The reason for this delay soon became clear: The Bat is not a very good book. It is a bad, bad book. Really, quite terribly bad.

I was surprised to find out that The Bat is actually set in Sydney. Norweigan detective Harry Hole (said "hol-ay" or, in Australian, "holy") has been sent from his native Oslo to help the NSW detectives investigate the murder of a Norweigan B-list celebrity, Inger Holter. Hole is paired with Aboriginal detective Andrew Kensington, who was one of the Stolen Generation. I found the decision to set the story in Australia incredibly strange. Possibly because a Norweigan audience would be unaware of Australia's history, characters are constantly giving Hole long speeches about Australia's history and the Dreamtime. I know I'm from Melbourne rather than Sydney but I've managed to live my entire life without having a stranger tell me a 15-minute long story about Aboriginal mythology. It just doesn't happen and was a really clunky, awkward device.

As they investigate Holter's murder, the team of detectives discover that her death is likely one of a series of deaths, implying that there is a serial killer on the lose. That's all good, because serial killers make good subjects of detective stories. However, the longer the story goes on, the more it becomes clear this is story is only interested in men. All the detectives are men. All the major characters are men. The only way women are represented is as ancillary to men - they are wives, mothers, girlfriends, cleaners, prostitutes (there's always a bloody prostitute somewhere in these misogynist mysteries), but never detailed characters in their own right. I then realised that Jo Nesbo is in fact a man, not a woman as I'd previously assumed (yes, I'm a bit slow. Probably why I am not a detective!). As I have written about before, I find it very hard to enjoy stories without decent female characters and unsurprisingly I found the categorisation of the women in this book both grating and sexist.

After a traumatic event near the end of the book, the alcoholic Harry Hole goes on a massive bender in Kings Cross. Again, I'm from Melbourne not Sydney and the book was written nearly 20 years ago but there is no way a foreigner could go on a three-day binge in the middle of an Australian capital city the way Hole is supposed to. He wasn't robbed, beaten, thrown into jail or even apparently noticed by anyone else. I've been out drinking in Sydney at night on a weekend (although not binge drinking) and I did not buy it at all. It seemed like really lazy writing. If he needs to go on a bender for the plot but also must emerge relatively unharmed, have him drink in his hotel room. Don't pretend that it happened while he was wandering around one of Australia's most notorious nightspots. Your audience is really not that stupid.

This book is pretty terrible. Harry Hole is an arsehole who does terrible things without any apparent consequence. Jo Nesbo is a sexist writer and the plot is at times not only unrealistic but downright ludicrous. But a lot of people whose literary opinion I respect have liked the series (and, incidentally,  not read this book), so I am assuming that the reason it took so long to be translated was because of the flaws I have noted here and I will give the series another go. Once some time has passed and I've forgotten how bad this one was, though...

Two stars.

Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (2014)

Sometimes, after a particularly gruelling or busy time with work, I have an inescapable compulsion to stay in bed and read all day long. No TV, no phones - just the printed word and hot, sugary beverages. However, if I am going to commit to a full day in bed drinking hot chocolate and not raising my heart rate above 90, then it needs to be a good book. Thanks to Simon Savidge's glowing review, I found the perfect one and spent last Saturday immersed in a sad yet lovely tale.

Elizabeth is Missing is told from the perspective of Maud, an elderly woman who has Alzheimers. She lives alone but is looked after by a carer and her daughter, Helen, and is slowly losing her ability to remember. As a mnemonic device, Maud writes notes to herself and these notes, whose meaning is often obscure once removed from the context in which they were written, fill Maud's pockets and are scattered throughout her house. There is one note that is repeated over and over again: Maud's friend Elizabeth is missing and no-one other than her is concerned. Amidst the current-day search of Maud for her friend, the story is intertwined with memories of Maud's childhood during the Second World War. Her sister, Sukey, who Maud adores, vanishes, most likely at the hands of Maud's family's lodger Douglas or Sukey's black marketeer husband Frank. The search for Sukey and Elizabeth drive both temporalities of the narrative.

One of the most effective elements of Elizabeth is Missing is the vastly different voices of the young and old Maud. Similarities in tone and character make it clear that the two are the same person but, while the young Maud's thoughts are crystal clear, the old Maud's are clouded and foggy. The entwining of these two stories and the parallel investigations into the disappearance of two women that Maud loves are done really well. In fact, the whole book is done very well - its exploration of ageing and illness are sad but at the centre of this book is the strength of family and of love. It's excellently written, engaging and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Four and a half stars.

Animal People by Charlotte Wood (2011)

Animal People is an Australian literary novel by Charlotte Wood. It follows a man, Stephen Connolly, over the course of a day. We very quickly learn a lot about Stephen: he is dating Fiona, who has two children, he has a troubled relationship with his mother and, although he has a job working in a cafe in a zoo, Stephen is not an animal person.

Stephen knew he demonstrated some lack of humanity by not being a Dog Person. This seemed unfair. He was not a cat person either. He was not an animal person in the same way he was not a musical person, or an intellectual person. One was born to these things, like the colour of one's eyes, or the length of one's legs. Not to be musical or intellectual was unremarkable and provoked no suspicion. But not to be an animal person somehow meant he wasn't fully human. (p28)

The person who gave this book to me said "It's not a long book but it took me a long time to get through." I found the book immediately engaging, so I tore through the first 80 pages quickly. As I read Stephen's reflections on love, family and poverty I kept thinking "Profound! So true!" But by about page 80, the initial infatuation had worn off. I realised that Animal People just like so many contemporary literary fiction novels - a well-written book about a white middle-class middle-aged man wanking on about the meaning of life and the human condition, including the literal wanking that now seems to be a prerequisite of any literal fiction novel (Why did that start? Is it supposed to be ironic? How can we get it to stop?).

Animal People is very well written. It does start off very engagingly. It is great to see an Australian female author doing well in the male-dominated field of literary fiction. But once the novelty of the concept of "animal people" wears off, it's pretty much just the same as all of the other literary fiction out there. If you like hearing male protagonists fretting about potential unfilled and disappointment in how their lives have turned out, then you will probably like this book. I personally think that if Stephen started seeing a therapist and finding the right combination of antidepressant meds, most of his problems would go away. Three stars.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (2014)

It's 1686 and 18-year-old Petronella Brandt (nee Oortman) has arrived in Amsterdam to join her new rich merchant husband Johannes. Nella's father recently died, leaving her family penniless and her with no options but to marry to survive. The marriage was arranged by Nella's mother and Johannes' sister Marin and Nella knows little of her husband or the life she is to live away from her family.

As days pass, Nella is lost and lonely in her new environment. Her sister-in-law Marin is cold and unfriendly, outwardly pious and self-flagellating but behind closed doors revelling in luxury. Johanne's manservant Otto is the first black man Nella has ever seen and she is fascinated by the sight of him and the colour of his skin. The maid Cordelia is irreverent and familiar like no servant Nella has ever known. Johannes is often absent and when he is in the house, distant and distracted. Nella waits night after night for the marital visit from him that she both dreads and looks forward to, but morning after morning she wakes alone. After two weeks of overhearing heated whispered conversations that she doesn't understand, Johanne arrives home with a wedding gift for Nella: a perfect miniature replica of their house. She writes to a miniaturist requesting items to fill it and, in doing so, inspires change within the house, for the miniatures that arrive demonstrate a knowledge of the events within the Brandt household that is both chilling and, for Nella, entrancing.

At its centre, this is a novel about women and the limits that are placed on them by society. Each of the three women who live in this house - Nella, Marin and Cordelia - are restricted in terms of their labour and the value its placed on it. Nella questions whether it is possible to be a real woman without bearing children while Marin sees marriage as a prison without escape. For Cordelia, being saved from an orphanage means constant backbreaking labour, where even "days off" involve cooking for the household. Beyond these three women dances the figure of eponymous Miniaturist: a female artisan working at a time where it is forbidden to apprentice women who lives alone in a city where the only women who do so are whores and widows.

The historical detail in this book is fascinating. It does start off quite slowly but once the miniatures start appearing, the narrative really starts to move. It opens a window to another time and place, which is what good novels should do. Three and a half stars.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton (2013)

I do not write about much my personal life on this blog. My aim has been to keep it as a space for my Serious Thoughts About Books (sometimes truthfully not all that serious, but I do try!). However, it seems appropriate to bend the rules a little bit because it's hard to discuss the book I am about to without referencing the context in which it was read. It is, as you might have guessed, Eleanor Catton's small-dog-sized novel, The Luminaries, which I was given as a present for Christmas. It is really big and really heavy, so I put it aside until my recent Easter holiday in Noosa, where I had four solid days to do nothing but hang by the pool, drink cocktails and read this book.

Four days proved to be not enough. The book, which won the 2013 Booker Prize, is set in the small gold rush town of Hokitika in New Zealand in 1866. Traveller Walter Moody has come to seek his fortune in the goldfields but arrives in the town in a state of great upset, having witnessed an unexplained event on the boat trip from England. In search of brandy and solace, he goes to the bar of the hotel he is staying in and stumbles upon a secret meeting of twelve local men. The town is in uproar due to the disappearance of local man Emery Staines, the attempted suicide of local prostitute Anna Wetherell, among other things, and all of the men are involved in some way in the events (and it is all men - there is no female dialogue until about the 150th page).

The novel starts brilliantly. It is written in the style of a nineteenth century novel and Catton captures the tone and form of that type of writing perfectly. I was so excited by this, because I love to read that type of book and the number of nineteenth century novels in existence is (obviously) finite. However, before too long it became clear that although the writing may be in the style of old English authors like Dickens, the structure is very modern. Each of the 12 characters in the secret meeting are representative of one of the figures of the zodiac, with their character traits resembling that of the zodiac signs. The structure of the book is also notable. It is divided into twelve parts, with each part being half the size of the part that preceded it. These stylistic decisions were obvious enough that the reader was meant to notice them but I have no idea what they were supposed to mean. While they absolutely made me think "Gosh, this Elinor Catton is a clever cookie", they did not add to my enjoyment of the story. In fact, I felt that the need to manipulate the story to fit into the pre-designated chapter length negatively affected the storytelling, in that some parts felt a bit rushed and others excessively drawn out.

I am torn in my opinion of The Luminaries. I think if Catton had've focused on the story rather than the structure, it would have been more entertaining and had a better narrative. But, if she had've done that, I doubt that she would have won the Booker. For me, The Luminaries was much much too long - it was physically painful to read the book for too long, it was so heavy - and I do think the story suffered because of stylistic decisions. But, I like artists who take risks and, while maybe this one didn't quite come off (if you need to introduce mystic realism at the end of the book to get your plot to work, it hasn't), I am excited to see what Catton does in the future.

My recommendation is, only read this book if you have a lot of time, a lot of patience and a Kindle. Three and a half stars.