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Collected Poems, by Jane Kenyon

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In any communication there is a sender, a transference medium, and a recipient. When you whisper a secret to a friend, you are the speaker; the medium is the vibration in the air; and your friend is the recipient. For writers, our medium is our written work and our readers the recipients.

Each of these three components affects the content and quality of the communication. In the various discussion groups and critique sessions in which I’ve participated, I’ve been continually impressed by the different interpretations that readers may bring to the same poem or story based on their personal experiences and associations.

For me, reading Jane Kenyon’s poems for the first time has been like falling in love, that moment when you meet someone who seems to be your soulmate, who speaks your language, who knows what you have been through. I recently moved to a different part of the country after spending most of my life in one place. This early poem, about her move to New Hampshire, made me lose my heart to Kenyon’s work.

Here

You always belonged here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit in with the furniture
and the landscape.

But I “follow too much
the devices and desires of my own heart.”

Already the curves in the road
are familiar to me, and the mountain
in all kinds of light,
treating all people the same.
And when I come over the hill,
I see the house, with its generous
and firm proportions, smoke
rising gaily from the chimney.

I feel my life start up again
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.

The initial uncertainty, the gradual familiarisation, the stunning final image: all of these are true to my experience. And as Adrienne Rich so beautifully said in her poem “Planetarium”, the poet “translate(s) pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”

This book is like a time capsule, holding Kenyon’s intense communiqués. Some read like prayers, some like a succession of images, inviting us to bring our own interpretations. She writes of love and light and herons and wasps, of depression and death and the things that survive or don’t.

Although the language seems simple, it is carefully crafted. An allusion here, a descriptive detail there, internal rhymes and repetition all work to create the music of these works.

One poem that intrigued me is “Briefly It Enters, And Briefly Speaks”. It is a list poem, almost a series of haiku, each starting with “I am”. It begins:

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . .

In trying to understand how this succession of images works as a coherent whole, I discovered subtle transitions: a starving girl to food on a plate to water filling a pitcher to a dry garden to a stone doorstep and inside a “heart contracted by joy. . . .”

I’m grateful to have found this treasure chest of poems that speak to me so clearly and illuminate my heart and give voice to my cares and celebrations. The speaker, the writer, may be gone but she has left us these gems to carry her voice to our ears.

Is there a poet or songwriter you’ve discovered recently whose work seems to speak to you?

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, by Walter Mosley

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With this novel, Mosley takes us on a different sort of journey. It’s a standalone novel, not part of one of Mosley’s mystery series. Here we are lured into the mind of ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey, a mind that is fraying at the edges.

Ptolemy lives by himself, surrounded by piles of newspapers and boxes, listening simultaneously to classical radio and television news. He relies on his grandnephew Reggie to take him to the bank and grocery, afraid to go out by himself or answer the door to anyone but Reggie ever since a large drug addict named Melinda began terrorising him and stealing his money. Physically frail, he also forgets things that have just happened or been said, finding his mind wandering back to people and incidents from his childhood.

When Reggie is killed (not a spoiler; we learn this in the first few pages), his place is taken by Robyn, a teenager who has been living with Ptolemy’s grandniece, who took Robyn in when her mother died. At first Robyn visits, accompanying him on errands, but appalled by the state of his apartment, she begins cleaning and clearing. Gradually the old man and lonely girl become friends.

Mosley captures the constant threats to an attractive young woman. Even before the stories that have come out through the #MeToo movement, Mosley shows how men assume they have a right to come on to Robyn and become angry when she rejects their advances. The girl carries a knife for protection and isn’t afraid to use it.

But this is Ptolemy’s story. There’s something he still has to do, an unfulfilled mission dating from his childhood. Buoyed by Robyn’s care and companionship, he’s willing to take terrible risks to accomplish it.

The book is a fascinating exercise in deep point of view (POV), also known as free indirect discourse. Most of us learned in school the difference between first- (I), second- (you) and third- (he, she, it) person POV, and omniscient POV.

As I mentioned in the blog post about James Woods’s How Fiction Works, there are variations of third-person POV. Deep POV takes the reader completely into the protagonist’s world, not just being told only what they see, hear, etc., but actually experiencing everything directly, as though you are inside the character’s mind.

Of course, this can get a bit suffocating. The trick is to move between levels, like a camera coming in for a closeup or pulling back for a long shot, without giving the reader whiplash.

Mosley accomplishes this gracefully. Looking at the first scene, we begin with a distant third-person, with the protagonist simply “the old man” answering the phone. On the second page we move in a little closer, getting some of his thoughts: “He was certainly there, on the other end of the line, but who was it? the old man wondered.” Then a few paragraphs later we move fully into his mind, with no “reporting words” as a tag, before moving out again:

Was the voice coming from the radio or the TV? No. It was in his ear. The telephone—

“Who is this?” Ptolemy Grey asked, remembering that he was having a phone conversation.

Mosley continues this dance, effortlessly moving in and out of the old man’s mind, never losing the reader, and making it all seem the most natural thing in the world.

Another aspect of this book that I appreciated is the way Mosley handles descriptions of new characters as he introduces them. As I mentioned in a blog post of one of his other books, he often gives a little physical description with some telling detail. Here are a bank teller and a man who runs a gym:

She was a dark-skinned black woman with bronze hair and golden jewelry around her neck and wrists and on at least three fingers.

The man who asked the question was on the short side but he had extraordinarily broad shoulders and muscles that stretched his T-shirt in every direction. His face was light brown and his neck exhibited the strain of a man pulling a heavy weight up by a long rope.

Mosley sometimes combines the description with action.

Big, copper-brown, and buxom Hilda “Niecie” Brown folded the frail old man in a powerful but cushioned embrace.

A high-yellow woman was slumped across the blue sheets of the bed, crying, crying.

“How are you, my friend?” the old, ecru-skinned Middle Easterner asked. He took one of Ptolemy’s big hands in both of his, smiling and nodding as he did so.

Sometimes he lets imagery do much of the work, saying of the woman who would become Ptolemy’s beloved second wife: “Her yellow dress made its own party”.

Mosley’s novels are always entertaining, but for me as a writer they are also a masterclass in writing craft.

Do you like novels that immerse you in the protagonist’s world?

Beeswing, by Richard Thompson

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Every December I publish my playlist, the songs I’ve been listening to that year. I say that songs are stories too, even the ones without words. And I believe that. I’m still fumbling with the most elementary level of music theory, yet each baby step reinforces that belief.

The story I’m obsessed with right now, the one that’s making it hard for me to pick up a book, is a song by Richard Thompson, an English singer/songwriter and amazing guitarist whom I first heard as part of Fairport Convention. I hadn’t heard this particular song before this week, though I understand it’s been around for a while.

In a concert celebrating the launch of his new CD Land of Fish and Seals, Keith Murphy sang Thompson’s “Beeswing”. In it a man recalls being 19 in the Summer of Love and falling for a girl who refuses to be tied down. The chorus goes:

She was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing
So fine a breath of wind might blow her away
She was a lost child, she was runnin’ wild. She said
So long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay
You wouldn’t want me any other way.

As my friend Mary said later, the lyrics are so evocative of that time. I was taken right back to myself at 18, 19, 20. Freedom was a word often on my lips and in my journal. It was the beginning of the second wave Women’s Movement and we were ready to shake off our mothers’ strictures. The little white gloves and girdles and pleated skirts we’d been brought up in were laid aside for bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts.

More than that, more than having the new magic Pill, we felt like pioneers, exploring where our souls might take us, holding hands in the dark, and running wild in the sunlit cornfields.

Keith brought just the right mix of gentle sadness and nostalgia to the song. The way he lingered on certain words and his deft guitar playing made the story even stronger. I remember that we were nostalgic even then, even in the middle of that time, because we knew it would not last.

It was a rare time, a gossamer time, so light a breath of wind might blow it away.

What’s on your playlist?

Waking, by Eva Figes

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I’d never heard of this author until my friend Nichael loaned me this book. It’s quite short, only 88 pages, but don’t be deceived. There’s a lifetime packed into this remarkable novel.

Each of the seven chapters takes us into the thoughts of our unnamed narrator at a different point in her life, from childhood to the edge of death. You may be reminded of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, as described in a monologue by Jacques in As You Like It: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon (which refers to a commedia dell’arte figure signifying an old fool), and old age: “second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Figes’s achievement is to translate these into the seven ages of woman. Every chapter invites the reader to fall into the experience of that age, whether it’s an awkward adolescent exploring her new body or an aging woman who feels “the accumulation of failure, loss, nothing has turned out as I intended it should”.

The significance of the title is that these are the her thoughts at the moment of waking, that time when sleep and dreams have not yet drifted away, yet our thoughts are turning to what’s present: our body, others around us, curtains at the window. It is a liminal time, a threshold, when the night’s outsize fears mingle with hopes for the day. We mull over losses and satisfactions, cast upon the night’s shore.

In her excellent book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends enhancing your creativity by writing Morning Pages. These are a few pages of freewriting, i.e., with no set topic. Of course, you could do them anytime, but she recommends the morning, when you first get up, because your unconscious is still active from its night’s work. You never know what will turn up.

What turns up here is stunning. I found myself wanting to cry out over and over: Yes, oh yes, I felt exactly that way. Each paragraph is packed with what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—moments of intense emotion, of living fully in the present. I recognised many, mostly ones I’d forgotten about.

I was so absorbed in the experience that it is only on rereading that I see how gorgeous Figes’s prose is, how intensely she uses all fives senses. I also see how subtle her transitions are, both within each chapter and between chapters. They are critical to making this stream of consciousness work smoothly and draw the reader along.

This novel is such a gem I am eager to read more of her work. I’m grateful for friends like Nichael who turn me on to new favorite authors.

Has a friend recommended a book to you that has turned out to be one of your favorite reads?

Delights & Shadows: Poems, by Ted Kooser

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I hadn’t read any of Ted Kooser’s work before, though I’d certainly heard of him. I opened this early collection at a random spot and started to read rather quickly.

I wasn’t particularly impressed: the rather ordinary language didn’t exactly sing to me and the insights—while making me smile—didn’t make me gasp. However, after a few poems, a sense of well-being stole over me, almost a sense of familiarity. Perhaps I had read them before after all? Or had somehow heard this voice?

I found myself thinking of the title of Alice Munro’s 2012 story collection Dear Life. And of Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir My Beloved World. There was something in this short, seemingly simple poems that I needed. I went back and reread them more carefully.

“Tattoo” recounts a moment at a yard sale: seeing an old man whose tattoo of “a dripping dagger held in the fist / of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise”, a lingering ache “where vanity once punched him hard”—a brilliant line. Note how the images do double duty: a bruise that is the blurred blue of an old tattoo and also a lingering ache, a punch that vanity requested being also like the needles that poked ink into his skin.

There is no mockery here, only fellow-feeling as the author notes the traces of youthful arrogance. The man is still strong and has “the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt / rolled up to show us who he was,” yet we see him as an old man, “picking up / broken tools and putting them back,” the broken tools again doing double duty. And the final line takes us back to the image at the beginning, now shimmering with all that we have learned about this man and all men in just these few lines.

There is a depth of compassion in these poems and a recognition of the small moments that illuminate what it means to be human. In “At the Cancer Clinic” we see a woman being helped across a waiting room by two others, perhaps her sisters, to where a nurse waits patiently. There’s the slight chuckle at calling the nurse patient, the sympathy at the woman’s slow progress, and then the surprising ending that elevates the scene into an evocation of what is best in all of us.

Another poem I loved is “Skater”. Having myself not started skating until middle age and being quite proud that I finally managed a waltz jump—a baby jump, the easiest of all—I thrilled to this joyous description of landing it, of how that experience changes you. Adding to the joy are the bright colors and the image of her skates braiding a path on the ice, echoing her ponytail in the first line.

My friend Dave has much to say against poetry that seems like prose. When I read the last poem in the book, I thought of him and how this could be prose if written without the line breaks. However, reading it again I saw how the images of time and fading light suggest the idea of aging, even death, with calm acceptance, even perhaps with gratitude for a life well lived.

A Happy Birthday

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

Have you read any of Ted Kooser’s poetry? Do you have a favorite poem of his?

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles

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Since I was due to visit Lyme Regis, I decided to reread this 1969 novel which is mostly set in that seaside town. Of course, my first memory from reading it almost 50 years ago was the gloriously romantic opening image of a woman, dressed all in black, staring out to sea from the end of the Cobb.

The Cobb in Lyme Regis is a mole, a grey stone wall that curves out into the sea like an arm protecting the harbor. It features in Jane Austen’s Persuasion where it is the scene of Louisa’s downfall as she attempts to jump into Captain Wentworth’s arms.

Fowles’s mysterious woman is Sarah Woodruff, a disgraced woman who according to gossips had run off with and been abandoned by the eponymous officer. She’d met him while he was recovering from a shipwreck in the house where she then worked as a governess.

She is observed by Charles Smithson, a privileged young man who considers himself a Darwinist, and his fiancé Ernestina Freeman, whose conventional views belie her surname. As part of his scientific pursuits, Charles hunts for fossils, reminding me of my recent reading about Mary Anning. He leaves Ernestina at home when he goes on these expeditions, so is alone when he encounters Sarah later and resolves to try to help her.

While written in the style of and using the conventions of Victorian literature, the story is narrated from the point of view of a modern-day man. With epigraphs and footnotes and commentary in the text, this narrator provides social and historical context for the struggles of his Victorian characters, sometimes criticising them, sometimes commiserating with them. He also openly discusses the problems and choices the writer faces in putting the story together.

This self-consciousness places the book in the wave of postmodern metafiction in the 1960s. Another metafictional aspect is that the narrator provides three possible endings.

While the “I” of the narrator calls himself a “novelist”, it seems to me he is instead yet another character rather than Fowles himself. He even shows up as a character near the end.

Thus, Fowles has quite a few plates to keep spinning. He risks losing the story’s momentum with his digressions about Victorian mores and morality or the clash of religion and science.

Yet these challenges for the reader play into the theme of free will, the monster released from its chains by Darwin and his colleagues. What are the risks when the strict conventions of religion and social convention are shown to be shams? How do we comprehend the world—or the world of the novel—when the framework we’d always used begins to dissolve? When are we most free, when we are “working well within a harness” as Frost says or when we take responsibility for living an authentic life per Kierkegaard?

The other main thing I remembered from when I first read this novel was which of the three endings I preferred and what that said about me. Reading the book now, I find it much more complex than I remembered. It is the sort of book that repays multiple rereadings.

I plan to read it yet again to see how Fowles manages the omniscient point of view—the sort most rarely used these days. It’s an interesting choice, setting up an omniscient narrator—albeit one whose power and knowledge he undercuts now and then—for a story of the time when people were coming to terms with the idea that there may not be an omniscient and omnipotent god.

What novel have you read and reread, finding more in it with each rereading?

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

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For once, I saw the film of this award-winning Young Adult book before reading the book itself. I’d taken an excellent workshop led by Rosoff, so when I saw the film listed, I decided to take a look. Only later did I follow up with reading the book, and was glad I did.

As the story begins, fifteen-year-old Daisy arrives in England, sent by her father and new stepmother to visit Aunt Penn, sister to Daisy’s mother who died when Daisy was born. The teen loathes her stepmother, who is pregnant, saying, “If she was making even the slightest attempt to address centuries of bad press for stepmother, she scored a Big Fat Zero.”

Daisy’s voice is the best thing about the book—surly, smart, funny and vulnerable. She’s met by her fourteen-year-old cousin Edmond, who is not only smoking a cigarette but has brought a “falling-apart” jeep in which he will drive her home.

Thus begins her adventures with her charmingly eccentric cousins in an old house in the countryside. Aunt Penn who is important in the government, leaves almost immediately “to give a lecture in Oslo . . . on the Imminent Threat of War.”

Daisy pays little attention to war-talk, since people had been yammering about the possibility for the last five years, though her oldest cousin Osbert can’t get enough of the latest news. She spends her days with Edmond, his twin Isaac, and their little sister Piper, and assorted dogs, goats and other animals. They fish and swim and picnic.

Then comes the invasion.

This is when the film blew me away. Watching it without knowing the story at all, I thought if a war came, it would be like the Land Girls or children being moved to the countryside during the Blitz, as in Lissa Evans’s Crooked Heart.

I was wrong. The images of rural England occupied by an enemy force—villages turned into military encampments, cars abandoned on country lanes for lack of petrol—shocked me deeply. And, to my shame, showed me just how superficial my empathy is for other countries trapped by warring armies: Sarajevo, Aleppo, so many others. Not England, I kept thinking.

Shameful, indeed.

I’m glad I went on to read the book. Not only is it more detailed and nuanced—movies must necessarily leave out much of what’s in a book—but Daisy’s voice is so true as she tries to keep her head above water, waters that get deeper and more treacherous as the story goes on. I felt I experienced every minute with her, every shifting emotion. We are all flawed beings; Daisy is no different, yet in rising to the occasion she finds an unexpected heroism. I felt privileged to spend these pages with her.

Have you read a book recently that showed you something new about yourself, perhaps something you’re not proud of?

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan

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On a July evening in 1962, a young newlywed couple sits down to dinner in their hotel suite on the Dorset coast. Bound by convention, they continue eating a meal they do not want, their attention drawn to the bed in the next room. Edward and Florence, both nervous, reflect on how their love for each other has brought them to this moment.

It may be hard for those born after the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and the availability of the Pill to understand the repression and gamesmanship of the time that came before. What little Florence has heard about sex disgusts her, but she is determined to do her duty. Edward has had only one experience, which did not go well, and has been kept at arm’s length by his beloved throughout their courtship.

McEwan expertly builds the picture of the time period and of these two—one a student of history and the other an apparently gifted violinist—who come from different levels of society. And yet, as I’ve found with other of McEwan’s novels, this story is mostly an intellectual pleasure.

I keep reading his novels because they are so well-constructed and so well-written. Individual sentences sparkle and delight. Yet there is something about McEwan’s novels that leaves me cold and unsatisfied.

Maybe it’s the sense that they are more an exercise than a story. The chessboard is laid out with care, each element with its purpose. The theme here is interesting: what we don’t say or do; society’s constraints versus how we feel. I find moments I recognize—ones I thought no one else knew—like the first thrill, dark and irresistible, of loosing the angry words suppressed in a lifetime of good behavior.

The plot is clear and cogent, from the usual McEwan beginning with a surprising event that changes everyone’s lives. What’s different here is that the book goes back instead of forward from that event. Only at the very end comes a quick summary of the resulting future. It is also different because it’s about what doesn’t happen. No stranger comes in and changes everything.

The characters are also well-constructed. I found Florence a little unrealistic, that she could be so completely frigid sexually and yet such a remarkable and passionate violinist. I wondered if perhaps there was some early trauma. McEwan drops a couple of hints of possible abuse, but—much as I appreciate subtlety and being left to figure things out by myself—it’s too little to make a case. I read an interview later where McEwan said that he left a few clues but didn’t want to make it explicit. I don’t think that is fair to the reader.

In the end, though, I don’t care about what happens to the characters. They seem like puppets being moved around. The story doesn’t engage my emotions. However, McEwan does bring back that time vividly. I found myself thinking of the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass, and how clearly I recall it after all these decades. This book, on the other hand, is fading quickly.

Have you read a novel that you appreciated, even admired, but didn’t enjoy?

Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor

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McGregor’s latest book is not for everyone. There are no car chases or spies or broken-down police detectives. There isn’t even a traditional protagonist. Reservoir 13 is the story of a village in the Peak District and its surrounding countryside. It’s a story about time, stretching over 13 years with each chapter covering a single year of the village’s life.

In quiet, exquisite prose, McGregor immerses us in this life. Holidays are celebrated, with fireworks at New Year’s and Guy Fawkes Day and a pantomime at Christmas. The agricultural life of the village goes on: haying, getting the cows in for their evening milking, looking for the sheep lost in a snowstorm. Hawthorne blooms; voles burrow under the hedges, fox cubs play outside their den.

Townspeople appear and reappear: a family who get called away from their sheep farm to rebuild bridges knocked out by storms and to do other heavy work around the village, a woman who is barely keeping her head above water caring for her autistic son, a man who visits his aging mother at Christmas and tries to avoid meeting up with his sisters, a woman who helps her elderly neighbor by walking his dog, and many more. In the course of the 13 years we follow children growing into their young adulthood, pairing off, breaking up, finding new loves.

At first I was afraid that I would have trouble following all these different characters, but in fact I had no problem keeping them straight. The author always provided small but necessary clues to remind me of who the person was and their relationship to others.

My only criticism of the book—and it is partially of the author and partly of the publisher—is that it begins with the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl. She and her parents, who are staying in the village over New Year’s, go for a walk and somehow get separated. By starting this way and by the promotional material, it sounds like it’s going to be a mystery, but it is not.

Instead, it is an examination in part—and only in part—of the effect of this event on the life of the town. As you can imagine, while the disappearance dominates the first year, over 13 years it begins to fade to an occasional memory, however much some individuals are changed by it.

The misleading description of the book as being about the girl’s disappearance sets up expectations that detract from the real pleasures to be found here. I almost came to see the disappearance as a clumsy attempt to start with a bang, in media res as we writers are advised to do. Yet nothing else here is clumsy.

I listened to this book. Some stories are better suited for audiobooks than others. I think I would have enjoyed reading it as well, but listening to it provided a sweet, almost trance-like pleasure. I started listening to it on a road trip but it was a little too quiet. However, during peaceful times at home or those sleepless hours in the middle of the night, it was exactly the right thing. I must have listened to it four times over by now. I even go back to chapters out of order now that I know the story. I never tire of it.

I love the rhythm of the year, the description of nature’s cycles, and the cycles of peoples lives: divorces, deaths, first loves. One of McGregor’s techniques to reinforce these cycles is to repeat certain phrases or sentences with slight variations. I love the image of the river that runs through town that turns over itself under the bridge and carries plumes of dirt over the weir. It reminds me of the quote from Heraclitus (as translated in my edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) “You can’t step twice into the same river.” We see the four children we see grow into young adults trying to do just that as their own personal ritual. Another interpretation of Heraclitus’s thought

. . . is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but something much more subtle and profound. It is that some things stay the same only by changing. One kind of long-lasting material reality exists by virtue of constant turnover in its constituent matter. Here constancy and change are not opposed but inextricably connected. A human body could be understood in precisely the same way, as living and continuing by virtue of constant metabolism–as Aristotle for instance later understood it. On this reading, Heraclitus believes in flux, but not as destructive of constancy; rather it is, paradoxically, a necessary condition of constancy, at least in some cases (and arguably in all).

McGregor’s remarkable story embodies this paradox. It is told in both linear and circular time—a remarkable achievement. The mystery here is not so much the disappearance of the girl, but the mystery of time, the center of this paradox of change and constancy.

This is not a book to rush through. It is a book to savor. it happens rarely, but sometimes I will read the first page of a book and think to myself: OK stop. You need to slow down and take your time and enjoy every second of reading this book. It almost never happens, but it did with this book.

Have you read a book that you just want to read over and over?

The Flight of the Maidens, by Jane Gardam

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Recently I encouraged my new book club to read Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt, a book which I enjoyed tremendously. Some people in the book club enjoyed it, but a couple of others said that they were put off by it and skimmed over it to read the ending. They said that because it was the story of a 13-year-old girl, they felt that they had lived through that stage and suffered that angst and did not want to relive it. I was surprised because part of why I loved the story so much was that I identified so strongly with the protagonist. I loved her imagination and could certainly identify with her struggles with her sister.

I expect that those same book club members would not enjoy this novel by Jane Gardam. It is the story of three young women who are a little older at 18. As it begins, they have just learned that not only have they gotten into the excellent universities to which they have applied, but they have received the state grants that will enable them to attend. The story then covers the two months as they prepare to leave home.

This is a remarkable time, this time of disentangling oneself from parents and childhood friends. Even more terrifying and exciting is that in this liminal space you can determine who you want to be, now that you have this great opportunity to present yourself as a different person to the world.

When you go off to school, where no one knows you, you can leave behind the person you’ve been for 18 years. Gardam’s choice of time period adds to the uncertainty: it’s 1946; the Second World War has only been over for a year; and everyone is adjusting to the new nuclear reality and the shocking news from Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.

Hefty has decided that at university she will be called by her full name Hester. She’s eager to escape from her clinging intrusive mother, whom she cannot help but love, just as she loves her father, who was greatly damaged in World War I. Once a promising scholar, he now digs graves and wanders about.

Her brilliant best friend Una has become a bit more distant this year, since Hetty took up with—and became engaged to—a pleasant milquetoast of a man. Una has been spending much of her time with her longtime friend Ray, once the fish boy and now working for the railroad. Una and Ray are mad for cycling but curiously silent with each other. Una’s mother operates a run-down hair salon in their home and has a hap-hazard approach to parenting

The third girl is Leiselotte, a German Jew brought to England in the 1939 kindertransport and placed with a Quaker couple. She has not been notified of her parents’ fate all these seven years. A quiet girl, who spends her free time knitting, she has kept to herself up till now, but is thrown together with Una and Hetty by their awards.

Like my friends I remember only too clearly that time of my life and at first was not sure that I wanted to relive it. However, I have been charmed by many of Jane Gardam’s novels and had great faith that she would intrigue me. I was not disappointed. Gardam fills out the cast with marvelously eccentric English characters and, as always, her prose is acerbic enough to offset any incipient nostalgia for the past.

I was most intrigued by the push-pull between the girls and their families at a time when it was unusual for girls to go off to university. With humor and insight, Gardam navigates these subtle currents of love and independence.

Does the age of the protagonist make a difference when you are choosing what to read next?