Month: August 2023

The Maid, by Nita Prose

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NOTE: There may be some spoilers in this review.

My first reaction to my local book club’s choice for this month was that it was a shoddy knockoff version of the delightful Japanese bestseller Convenience Store Woman. Like that subtle, smart novel, Prose’s protagonist is a young woman apparently on the autism spectrum who works in a menial job and loves it. Unfortunately, The Maid doesn’t measure up.

Molly Gray works as a chambermaid in a five-star hotel where she enjoys restoring each room to “a state of perfection.” Less enjoyable is the disdain with which most of her colleagues treat her—referring to her a weirdo, a robot, a Roomba—though not to her face. Still, she calls on the platitudes and proverbs she learned from her gram, recently deceased, to keep her world in order. Then one day she enters a room to clean it and finds the guest staying in it dead on the bed.

Billed as a cosy mystery, the book fails to be either. True, there is a death and cups of tea, but there is no intrepid sleuth tracking down the killer. There are no clues to follow, no investigation. Instead, the story limps through a threadbare plot, every step of it embarrassingly obvious. There are a few gratuitous “twists” at the very end which come across as cheap tricks because they are not integrated with the plot at all.

Not only is the plot childishly simple, but the language is in the middle grade range (appropriate for age 8-12), often even simpler than that. And that gets to the worst aspect of the book. Since it’s quite obvious to the reader what’s going on, the plot is not the driving force in the book. Neither is the setting, which is barely sketched in. The people in the story are caricatures and stereotypes, either all good or all bad, so nothing there to keep the reader going. The only thing left is Molly herself.

Yes, the force propelling the story is the reader’s amusement as Molly constantly misinterprets what’s obvious to all of us neurotypical folks and responds with prim childish speeches. Making fun of neurodivergent people is a bizarre—and repulsive—choice for the basis of a book. I’m aghast that so many people seem to think this is just great, and that the book has won multiple awards, achieved bestseller status, and will be made into a film.

Making Molly be so childish and naïve seems like the author knows nothing about autism. We talk about cultural appropriation in literature. If a neurotypical author is going to write a first-person novel in the voice of a neurodivergent person, they ought to at least be knowledgeable about the condition. There’s also the way Juan Manuel, who works in the hotel’s kitchen, is presented as naive, unintelligent and helpless, summoning the most despicable stereotypes about immigrants and Mexicans. The police too are shown as bumbling and cruel.

In addition to the above concerns, there are gaping holes in the logic of this story, For example, Molly bounces back and forth from clueless to astute and back again. She tells us about her condition, but sometimes doesn’t show it in her behaviour. Also, no police detective arresting a young woman in her pajamas, would cart her off to jail without enabling her to get dressed. Here, Molly even has to appear in court in her jail-begrimed pajamas, like that would actually happen.

Maids do not trundle their carts through the lobbies of five-star hotels or leave them outside the door to the bar. Nefarious boyfriends are not able to clean out a person’s entire savings account at an ATM in one fell swoop; there are limits on how much you can take out at a time. Plus, how is it that criminals can be running a drug ring in a fancy hotel without anyone noticing? Where are the security people?

Most of all, how is it that no one, from Molly’s childhood teachers to her co-workers to anyone on the police force, recognises that she is neurodivergent?

I am baffled by the praise heaped on this book. As I read it, I alternated between boredom and outrage. Of course, even though it’s a first novel, the author is a longtime editor and, at the time it was published, vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster, so she knows a few people.

There are some cute things in the story, like the devotion of Molly and her gram to the Olive Garden and the old tv Show Columbo. But that’s not enough to make up for the story’s weaknesses.

What story have you read with a neurodivergent narrator? What did you think of it?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

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Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?

Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry

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Tom Kettle is a retired Irish detective, living out by the coast, in a lean-to attached to an old castle. In retirement, he does nothing or, as he says, stays “stationary, happy and useless.” For nine months he has treasured his empty days, when they are interrupted by two junior detectives appearing at his door.

They’ve come to ask for his help with an old case, one Tom worked on: the murder of a priest who had been accused of abusing children. But this is no police procedural, with a brilliant sleuth and a puzzle for the reader to figure out.

There is a puzzle for sure, but much of it has to do with how much Tom can rely on his own thoughts. His mind moves plausibly between day and dream, present and past, until the reader is left wondering whether a visitor is real or a ghost, if things happened the way Tom described them yesterday to the way he describes them today.

He’s buried under the weight of the past. The abuse he endured in the orphanage, witnessing the sexual assault of boys “with the light in their eyes put out” by the priests was still not as awful as his wife’s suffering in the convent. Later, he thought they’d outrun the priests and the horrors, him doing well in the Garda, June raising their two smart and wonderful children. But those cautiously happy years have been erased by the repeated traumas of his police work and by his unbearable losses.

His memory slips around like a Rubik’s cube, realigning sometimes in a new pattern or falling into chaos. He cannot trust his own mind, his own senses. He becomes friends with another tenant of the castle, a cellist—or was that a dream? Tom often hears the cellist practicing Bruch’s Opus 47, an adagio based on the Kol Nidre, a Hebrew and Aramaic declaration that is associated with the “day of atonement” in the Jewish calendar.

Just as Tom navigates his slippery sense of reality, the reader is carried from a scene of pure realism into stream of consciousness into dreams and memories. It’s a brilliantly written book. I had to pay attention, and sometimes be patient, but I never lost the thread of the story. I wondered at some of the detours, but in the end could see they were all necessary.

This is a story about trauma, how it is carried in the body and the mind, how it endures into the next generation. Tom Kettle has his code. He struggles to hold onto his integrity even as he tries to sort out in his own mind what is true and what is not.

In my book club we often talk about how some novels require an extra effort from the reader, a bit more thought, a little more patience. I won’t deny that Barry’s novel is difficult to read, both because of its slippery narrative and the terrible descriptions of abuse, but it is well worth the effort. It’s unforgettable.

Have you read a novel by Sebastian Barry? What did you think about it?

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayake Murata

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This quiet, first-person narrative from Japan invites us into the life of a woman at odds with her culture. At thirty-six, Keiko Furukura still works part-time in a convenience store, a situation that is considered disgraceful in a society that values high-pressure careers. Even worse, she’s unmarried; in fact, she’s never even had a boyfriend.

She’s been working at the same store for half of her life and is an excellent employee: always polite with customers and colleagues, cheerful and hard-working. Keiko, who is neurodivergent (probably somewhere on the autism spectrum), responds well to the clear instructions in the store’s handbook and the rigid daily routine.

While she is proud of her success at the store, her family and friends worry about her and encourage her to take steps to become more “normal.” It’s hard not to worry about her when she has let the store dictate every moment of her life, even when she is not at work. For example, she makes sure she eats meals and gets enough sleep, not for her own sake, but so she will be at her best when she is at the store.

This is a slight book and I don’t want to give too much away. I’ll just say that the story is driven by that conflict between her life and what society deems normal. The conflict is exacerbated by being set in Japan, where conformity seems to be the highest virtue.

Thus, the story explores nonconformity and—almost as an aside—gender roles. In Japan the title translates to Convenience Store Human, and I’m told that Japanese readers, with whom the book is enormously popular, are mystified that U.S. readers find gender issues in the book.

Still, my book club believed gender was key to the story. For one thing, there’s the role reversal of a potential boyfriend wishing to stay home and do nothing while Keiko works to support him—another instance of nonconformity.

More importantly, there is the essential conflict for women of how much to accommodate society’s attempts to control what they are allowed to wear, what jobs they can have, even whether or not they bear a child. As one person said, the book explores the cost to women of being yourself. She added that these days the attempt to be happy with who you are is undermined even further by social media.

Of course men, too, suffer from rigid social norms, though I believe less so in the U.S. than in Japan’s work-obsessed society. And there is, in the U.S. at least, a strong movement in the radical right to control women and subjugate them to men.

I saw one additional—and subversive—point in Keiko’s story. Her robotic conformity makes her the perfect employee. She’s never late—often early, in fact—and never misses a day. She obeys every rule in the manual. She makes no demands on the company or the manager. She expects nothing for herself: she is there to serve the customers; she is there to serve the store. If this is the ideal employee, what does that say about the future of work?

My book club commented on the short, fairly simple sentences as being appropriate for the character. Of course, we read the book in translation, so wondered how it would sound in Japanese.

This book may be short, but it is not simple. We found a lot to ponder in it.

Have you ever read a story that seemed slight at first, but upon reflection turned out to have multiple layers?