Category Archives: Book reviews

As it happens, I have read two historical novels in fairly close succession. In the first, The Birth House, I felt that the plot was being driven by the desire to draw in as much historical detail as possible. In this second book, Booth, there is the opposite scenario: fidelity to the events and personalities has meant that plot development is slow and measured. The events of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are well-known (probably much more to American readers than to Australian ones) and the author’s intent here is to widen her lens to look at the family of John Wilkes Booth and the effect of his radicalization and its resultant crime on the Booth family more broadly. Much like Jacinda Ardern’s refusal to name the Christchurch terrorist, Karen Joy Fowler does not dwell on the assassination as such, but more the events leading up to and following on from it.

The book also clearly locates itself in the present day, although it is only in the Afterword and Acknowledgments that she identifies Donald Trump by name. But the first of the Lincoln-related chapters starts with an epigraph from Lincoln himself asking Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch will at some stage spring up amongst us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. (p. 5) The theme of political violence, both through civil war and through the acts of an individual, throbs underneath the book.

The historical John Wilkes Booth is not the only Booth in this story. Instead, it is the whole family of Booths- father and sons. It opens with Junius Booth who emigrates with his family to Baltimore where he becomes a celebrated Shakespearean actor. Several of his sons follow in his footsteps: June, a rather unsuccessful actor; John Wilkes who was to become (in)famous for other reasons; and Edwin, who becomes the most famous and wealthy of them all, although for many years in his father’s shadow. Joe, the youngest son, is the only one not to follow his father’s theatrical career. Rosalie, his eldest daughter never marries and finds herself subject to her brothers’ plans and domestic arrangements, while her sister Asia does marry and has several children. The family itself displays different political leanings (shades of Trumpism here too) with the increasing radicalization of John in the face of his siblings’ varying degrees of support for Lincoln and abolition. Each member of the family was affected differently by John’s actions. All are shunned, with instant career implications for the brothers who were working as actors. Some family members blamed themselves, or each other, and all distanced themselves from the assassination.

The narrative intertwines the stories of Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth as they both move towards the assassination that we know will happen by the end of the book. There is an irregular structure within the Booth stories. At times the narrative just flows chronologically, but at other times the author takes each family member in turn to explore events from their perspective (but still with omniscient narrator voice). I found this inconsistency rather annoying: I prefer a structure to be sustained throughout. There are many small chapters- rather too many for my liking- headed with a roman numeral, evoking a 19th century novel. The narrative is in the present tense, which worked well in highlighting the contingent and unfolding nature of events.

As she explains in the afterword, Fowler has blended fact and fiction. The Booth family has been much researched, both at the time in trying to make sense of the assassination, and later in historicizing it. Rosalie as the eldest daughter was the least defined historically, which gave author greatest scope for invention, albeit within the constraints of the spinster daughter role.

Karen Joy Fowler is explicit in her linking Lincoln’s assassination and the rise of Donald Trump. Would the book work just as well without these current-day references? I suspect that it would, although I wonder how a pro-Trump reader would react to her clearly anti-Trump stance. As it is, it is a well-researched fictionalized telling of a family story that wears its research lightly, but subjects itself to the constraints of facts in its plot. For me, this is historical fiction with fidelity.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

So what do you do when you have a memoir in your hand, but know absolutely nothing about the author? One option is to start Googling so that you have some context into which to slot the biography, and to gauge some sense of authority of the writer. The other is to just read it as a piece of writing, on its own terms, and then Google afterwards. This is the approach I took with ‘Swimming Home’ by Judy Cotton.

So, drawn from this memoir, who is Judy Cotton? She is an artist, based in New York, but born in Australia during WWII in Broken Hill. Her father, later to be the parliamentarian and U.S. ambassador Sir Robert Cotton, trained for the RAAF but was posted to Broken Hill by the Dept of Supply during WWII because of his familiarity with mining. He and his family later shifted to Oberon in NSW to establish a timber industry, another crucial war-time industry. Judy was one of three children born to Robert and his wife Eve. The children were sent to boarding school in Sydney where Judy’s older sister Anne received treatment for crossed-eyes. Her father embarked on a parliamentary career with the Liberal Party and her mother, an accomplished pianist became involved in sheep-breeding. Judy attended university and married a diplomat who was posted to Korea. Her marriage broke up, and she and her son Tim went to Japan, and then to New York where she worked as a journalist and successful artist, until contracting Lyme disease which forced her to change her artistic direction. Her parents moved to America too, when her father was appointed Consul-General in New York between 1978-81 and U.S. Ambassador between 1982-85 before returning with Eve to retirement in Sydney and then Palm Beach. Her mother died in 2000, her father six years later in 2006, having re-married.

All of this sounds quite straightforward, but I have imposed an order that does not exist onto this memoir, thereby leaching it of its power and beauty. You have to work hard as a reader to piece a chronology together: indeed, I could only do it by going back to read it again. The chronology does move forward at a chapter level, but each chapter splinters into shard from different times, identified by year, but fused together. It is more like a mosaic than a canvas. Although a memoir, many aspects of Cotton’s own life are left oblique – her first marriage, her success in New York, her 40 year relationship with Yale.

The book opens in 1923 with ‘Eve’ playing imaginary scales while hiding under the fig tree. She was somewhat in awe of her beautiful older sister Jean, protected by her mother Ollie from her drunken father Archie. We soon learn that ‘Eve’ was Judy Cotton’s mother. And the cracks in the author’s relationship with her mother are quickly revealed:

Eve rated my sister and me by the same terms, and we both lost in the equation. She scored us on looks, clothes and marriages, having decided that achievement in the world was best left to my father. She worked hard to even things up between my sister and me, tying me down by one metaphorical leg so that I could not run faster than my blue-eyed sister

p.14

I must admit that my heart sank a bit when I read this. As I explained in my review of Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter (see my review here), I am not particularly comfortable with the parental memoir genre, and the sense of grievance that seems to pervade it. It’s certainly in evidence in this book, as Cotton stores up the injustices and harsh comments committed by her mother in a form of emotional ledger.

What are Judy Cotton’s accusations against her mother? Sending her two daughters away from their country town in NSW to boarding school ; her parents’ (especially her mothers’) response to Judy’s divorce “they wanted to see the wreckage for themselves…they left me stranded and penniless in Korea in the hope that it would force me to stay married and not embarrass them”. Once divorced and living in Japan with her son “Eve [her mother] waged a relentless campaign for me to return to Australia so she could ensure I did not take lovers and become like Jean [her mother’s sister]”. Her mother, by then living in New York with her husband who was US ambassador, had a heart attack: “Eve worked up a good set of arterial blockages in preparation for a massive heart attack. She had talent and she used it”. On her mother’s return to Australia, she remained imperious to the last. She had a clear sense of how things should be, rejecting things that were ‘not just exactly right’. She was blunt, with a pertinent charm: ‘Horizontal stripes are unkind to your hips’ ‘Oh dear, not grey again’.

She commented on inappropriate clothing, husbands and haircuts, on roots showing, a vase of flowers or world news not arranged to her liking. She pecked at tiny flaws and big ones, a hen in the yard after grain, a pianist aiming for precisely the right note

p.105

In these lists of wrongs, I sense little of the adult (with her own secrets, compromises and vulnerabilities) appraising another adult (with her own secrets, compromises and vulnerabilities), only the resentful, hurt child. And yet, from the outside, Cotton would seem to be very much the dutiful, loving daughter. When her mother is elderly and failing, she flies back and forth over the globe, sitting by her hospital bed, being as supportive as an expatriate child can be. She is both made by her mother’s life, and unmade by her mother’s death.

It is this sense of being drawn away and yet returning that is captured in the title ‘Swimming Home’ and in the frequent descriptions of shores that are repeated throughout the book. It is there right in the opening preface:

Undertow is perilous, the Pacific riptide hauling me hand over hand like a movie on rewind as I watch from the plane. Landing, I struggle to take off instead, but no matter how many times I leave, the land has me by the ankles with a grasp that won’t let go

Dedication

She returns again and again to the sea, just as she returns again and again to Australia with its light, its smells, its birds, its trees. It is a wide Australia on a huge canvas: it is also a prison, steeped in the blood of dispossession and injustice. The ocean represents openness and distance, and yet also a treacherous pull. Her descriptions of the sea are beautifully created images. I think of George Orwell’s injunction against worn-out metaphors, and certainly she has imbued each of her descriptions of the sea with new, completely original images. The Pacific “hiccuped its briny breath”, it has “goosebumps”, the waves are “an ancient island’s rasping breath” and, most evocatively “the sea shivering in filmy layers as if it were sheer fabric pulled diagonally in ruched pleats one across the other ” (p. 103).

Her final words encapsulate the expatriate’s tug and flow.

Then I will leave again, attempting to evade the land and people that still hold me prisoner, shake off its fierce undertow…I resist the invisible feelers that creep like tiny heat-seeking missiles to cut to my core. I cannot afford to feel. Age has taught me that. I leave again.

No one’s story can explain the past.

No one story

p. 126

I must admit I found myself relieved that this memoir was relatively short (my e-version has 131 pages; the paperback book appears to have 240 pages). The writing is almost too sharp, too crystalline, almost as if you were reading a whole book of poetry in one sitting. I found myself gaining a new appreciation for the book in the second reading I was compelled to undertake, in order to be able to write this blogpost. And this written, now I’ll look at her work.

My rating: 8/10 (hard to say)

Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc. books.

I had to wait for a long time for this book to become available at the library, and it was well worth the wait. I just loved it, and didn’t want it to finish. The story is set in New York in 1937, and is evocative of all those black-and-white films with the Empire State Building in the background and imbued with New York glamour. There’s shades of Gatsby here too, through the first-person narration of a young woman of humble background who is drawn into the milieu of fabulously wealthy people.

The frame story introduces us to Katey Kontent on the 4th October 1966 who, along with her husband, attends a photographic exhibition ‘Many are Called’ at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition features never-before-seen portraits taken by Walker Evans with a hidden camera in the late 1930s on the New York subways with a hidden camera. These black-and-white images are of just ordinary people, taken without their knowledge or consciousness. One image in particular attracts her attention. She knows that well-dressed, urbane business man, and she knows that an image of a gaunt, disheveled man is him too- it is Tinker Grey.

And thus we are taken back to New Years Eve 1937, when Katey, along with her room-mate Eve Ross, first meet Tinker in a nightclub, as they try to eke out their money for drinks to see them through to the new year. Eve, is blonde, with dimples “so perfectly defined that it seemed like there must be a small steel cable fastened to the center of each inner cheek” (p.15) Tinker is rich and good fun, and both girls – neither of whom is rich – are swept up into a life of parties and nightclubs until it all comes to a sudden halt. Despite Katey and Tinker’s attraction to each other, life goes off in a different direction. Katey takes us through the year of 1938, each time taking care to note the exact date, as she changes her job, and negotiates her way around a wealthy, dissolute milieu with Wallace Wolcott, Dicky Vanderwhile, and Anne Grandyn. Meanwhile, Eve and Tinker go off on other trajectories. One one level, Katey learns that wealth and power can influence events and give people the wherewithal to manipulate and intervene in other people’s choices: on another level, there is still that aspect of chance and unexpected event that sends everything awry.

The title of the book comes from the Young George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation which Katey discovers amongst Tinker’s possessions. She realizes that these 110 homespun maxims are more influential on Tinker than she at first thought, especially the last one: “Labour to keep alive in your Breast that Little Spark of Celestial fire called Conscience”. And it was that last one that brought Tinker to the dishevelled state that the photographer Walker Evans captured in his photograph.

At the end of the book, and looking back on that year of her life, the older Katey says:

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time- by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?…

Life doesn’t have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you’re presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course- that’s by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn’t come without a price.

p. 323

I’ve been oblique about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. Suffice to say that I really enjoyed reading this book and feel as if I have been in the hands of a master storyteller.

My rating: 9.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

I must confess that I’ve never really engaged in discussions of Australian identity. It has always seemed to me to be a topic that can too often by hijacked by the ra-ra Akubra mob, and infused with the whole Anzac, flag, fair dinkum rhetoric. But I was encouraged to read this book, largely on the basis of the many positive blurbs on the cover, but also by the inclusion of that little word “soul”. Leaving aside its religious connotations (which Schultz does too), she is probing beyond the surface and the image to consider something more personal, more integral to the idea of Australia and Australians, as distinct from the performance of Australian-ness. As a commentator she is well placed to do so: she was the inaugural editor of the Griffith Review which, over and beyond the 64 volumes she edited, has explored various features of Australian life in essays, poetry and story.

In many ways the chapter headings in this book echo the titles of the Griffith Reviews that I have on my shelves: From Somewhere; Making the Nation; Remaking the Nation; People Like Us; From Little Things. Like a Griffith Review volume, these discursive chapters weave together strands of her own biography, history, literature and politics.

She has a number of themes that she returns to across different chapters. One of these is the idea of the ‘Covid X-ray’ which revealed the fault-lines within Australian society. Another is Linda Colley’s idea that, without catastrophe, most change takes ‘three score years and ten’ to move from idea to reality- an oddly reassuring thought. Schultz references this ‘three score years and ten’ often during her book, giving it an oddly ponderous, almost religious tone at times. She refers several times to the Sydney Olympics and the feeling of pride that many of us, ready to sneer, felt at its irreverent and insouciant depiction of our country on a global scale. Where has that Australia gone? Finally, and most importantly, she returns again and again to the Uluru Statement, that call to Australia’s soul, that she feels will “sooner or later, fundamentally reshape the idea of Australia” (p. 146).

This book is unashamedly a product of the twenty-first century. Her chapter-by-chapter references (unfortunately the book lacks a compiled bibliography) favour recent publications and the rather excessive long list of laudatory paragraphs at the start of the book embed the book within a progressive intellectual milieu. So far, I have not read reviews of the book from The Australian or Quadrant, which ordinarily would leap on a book about ‘Australia’s identity’- one of their favourite topics despite their deprecation of ‘identity politics’. In a way this book is timely, given that we faced a general election in the wake of strange times. But I also have hopes that, given its historic span that draws from historians and events across Australia’s history, it might transcend that short-termism. I suspect this book may well stand the test of time, as Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, Hancock’s Australia, Bernard Smith’s Boyer Lecture The Spectre of Truganini and Stanner’s phrase ‘The Great Australian Silence’, each of which she references repeatedly, have managed to do. At least, I hope that it does. By talking of ‘the soul of the Nation’ she steps beyond the economy and politics into something more intimate and powerful and inspirational.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

I admit it- I was attracted to the cover of this book, and it was only when I looked closer that I discovered that the author had written A Little Life, a big fat book that I have on my shelves but have not read, even though I know there was a lot of commentary about it. The author is obviously fond of writing big fat books, because this is another one, at 704 pages. But for the last few days I have been completely engrossed in it, and even now I don’t want it to end.

It is set in three parts, each set 100 years apart. This is clear from the start, with the opening pages consisting of three hand-drawn maps, each related to Book I, II or III. The first depicts the the United States in 1893, showing the Free States on the East Coast; the United Colonies in the ‘South’; a blank Uncharted Territories where Utah, Arizona and New Mexico are today; The Western Union comprising California, Washington State and Oregon and the American Union, comprising all the other states, in the centre. The second map is of the Hawaiian Islands in 1993, and the third map, dated 2093, shows Manhattan Island, divided up into Zones, with Central Park now ‘The Farm’ and with Washington Square marked out in Zone 8. The building in Washington Square is important, as it is going to appear in some guise in each of the three Books.

In Book I (1893) we find David Bingham, the unmarried son of a rich grandfather who has made him heir to the Washington Square house on his death. This first book was very evocative of Edith Wharton’s work, both in its focus on the nuances of upper-class life, and in its formal, mannered language. But this New York is set askew: the Free States and the United Colonies are two separate nations after all, and homosexual marriage is an accepted fact. David’s grandfather is concerned that his grandson marry, and so he encourages an arranged relationship between David and the older Charles Griffith. Despite knowing that his grandfather is acting only out of love, David becomes infatuated with an impoverished, unreliable and possibly dastardly teacher Edward Bishop, who implores David to accompany him to California, even though homosexuality is illegal there. I just loved this first part – the cushioned luxury, the restraint, set against the passion and recklessness of David and Edward’s relationship. I didn’t want to let them go as I turned to Book II, set 100 years later in Hawaii.

But hold on- here they are again – David, Edward, Charles, Eden – but they’re not the same people, even though the names are the same. Here is another aimless David Bingham, but this time he is the young partner of an older Charles Griffith, who lives in Washington Square and who this night is hosting the final party of his former lover Peter who is dying of cancer, even though AIDS is ravaging the gay community. He receives a letter from his dying father from Hawaii, another David Bingham, known as Wika (for Kawicka) who has been inveigled? coerced? by an old schoolmate Edward Bishop into stepping into his role as hereditary royalty in establishing a breakaway settlement in Lipo-Wao-Nahale. Edward and David live there, and David’s son (also named David) lived there during vacations as well, until he refused to visit any more, travelling instead to New York where he met Charles Griffith. His father, David Bingham senior, has a breakdown and is hospitalized, writing his last letter to his son. I must admit that after my initial delighting in meeting David, Edward and Charles again, this second book left me underwhelmed, with the last-supper dinner of the dying Peter seeming to stretch on interminably, mirrored by the equally prolonged death of David Bingham senior in Hawaii.

[Update: I have since learned more about the history of Hawaii through a ‘Stuff They Don’t Want You to know podcast, which I mention here, most particularly the coup d’etat by white landowners in 1893. Clearly 1893 is a significant date- but why did she set Part II a hundred years later? I’m mystified.]

Any disappointment that I felt in Book II was quickly forgotten in Book III, set in Manhattan in 2093. It doesn’t surprise me that this book was published in 2022 because it certainly bears the traces of the COVID pandemic. Now that I had realized how the book worked, I was on the lookout for David, Charles and Edward and they were here too, but in very different guises. New York- and indeed, the whole world- had been ravaged by waves of pandemic diseases, with resultant surveillance and government over-reach to quell and fend off the next epidemic. Global warming has resulted in the collapse of the food chain, there is an ongoing drought, and New York is only liveable if you wear a cooling suit while you are outside. Charlie is the grand-daughter of Charles Griffith, who has been the policy architect of a lot of the pandemic responses: confinement of infected people and their families (after initially separating children from their parents, whole families would go into confinement and inevitable death together), wholesale cremations, rigid government control. Charlie had contracted one of the pandemics as a child, and is now infertile and emotionally frozen, and her grandfather arranges for her to marry Edward, a gay man who will look after her but never love her. The narrative is in two parts here: Charlie’s story told with Ishiguro-like flatness, and as a series of letters over decades between Charles and Peter, a high-level bureaucrat in New Britain. While the letters did fill in background for how New York had ended up as it had – and a very depressing trajectory is it, with more points of verisimilitude than I like- the idea of letters being so lengthy and conversational is rather implausible.

Despite its severity, I really enjoyed Part III, as much as I did Part I and I have found myself thinking about Part III a lot since finishing reading it: for me, a sign that a book has really affected me. Reading back over this review, I see that I have likened the writing to Edith Wharton or Kazuo Ishiguro, and there is an element of pastiche about the book. There were hints that the whole thing was going to fall into place with a resounding clunk, but that never happened. Instead there were wisps of connections, and a low drumbeat of repeated themes- homosexuality, illness, searching for something better, loneliness – and the repeated names. Worth 700 pages? For me, yes.

My rating: 9.5/10 (Maybe even 10/10?)

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.