Reading McCullers

"... vain, querulous and a genius"

"She needed a certain amount of alcohol in her system to function creatively"

"we know from your first book that you're a nigger-lover, and we know from this one that you're queer. We don't like queers and nigger-lovers in this town."

What others have said about American author Carson McCullers who is profiled in this excellent piece by Ali Smith in the Guardian.

I discovered McCullers in my teens when, miracle of miracles, I found that the English stockroom of my school was unlocked, and inside there were piles of novels! Better still, I found that some hardworking teacher had compiled and cyclostyled long-lists of "suggested reading" for other classes and I used them as my guide to the shelves. I hid in this little room from the prefects during lunch breaks (we were supposed to be outside getting "fresh air" in often sub-arctic conditions!), sneaking books out to read at home and replacing them as soon as I'd read them. Thanks my unseen mentor, this was the best introduction to "quality" fiction that I could have had. (I think this also explains my great enthusiasm for reading lists.)

I read first The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers novel about a deaf-mute who moves to a small southern mill town, and was totally blown away by it (so much that I can still pretty much remember it in detail x decades on!). Then in rapid succession I read The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the the Sad Cafe. I have an urge now to reread them ... and I wonder how they will have changed half a lifetime on? (Because of course, books always change when we aren't looking.)

McCullers, of course, was an unredeemable bookaholic herself (as all authors must be) :

She was capable of reading so deeply that she wouldn't notice her own house go up in flames around her, as once happened when she was lost in Dostoevsky. Unable as a child to stop reading Katherine Mansfield's stories when she went to the store for groceries, she carried on as she asked for the goods at the counter, then under the street lamp outside. As a fledgling writer, she was sacked from her day job as a book-keeper for a New York company when the boss found her deep in Proust's Swann's Way under the big ledger.

By the way, I came across a post on a blog some time back in which a teenage writer was talking to her teacher about award winning books and was told that such titles were "too deep" for her. I really saw red when I read that! How does anyone have the right to tell you what you can and cannot cope with at what age?

Accidental Deliberations

My head having been restored to me sans cotton wool stuffing, thank goodness, I was at last able to finish Ali Smith's Booker shortlisted, The Accidental.

And excellent it is indeed.

A dysfunctional family spends the long summer vacation in a rented house in a Norfolk village. Eve, the mother is a blocked novelist. Michael her husband (and the children's stepfather) is an English lecturer (lecher?) who's about to be suspended for having affairs with students. Magnus (17) is on the brink of suicide after a school prank went disastrously wrong, while Astrid (12) is totally disaffected and bored, trying to make sense of the world around her through the lens of a camcorder.

Enter Amber aka Alhamabra, named for the cinema where she was conceived between shows. Michael thinks she's one of Eve's friends. Eve thinks she's one of Michael's students. Each member of the family in turn falls under her spell. But is she malign spirit, ghost, or flesh and blood? Does she exist at all? (There's a very clever echo of this idea when Michael watches Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes with the kids towards the end of the novel.) The question doesn't need to be answered because the mystery is in itself delicious. What's real or unreal anyway in fiction or in film?

More than this I won't say because I don't want to post a spoiler - the plot is too enjoyable to give away. The characters are strong and their internal struggles vividly depicted. Smith uses a different narrative method for each of them, moving from one consciousness to another in alternating chapters. (I particularly enjoyed being inside Astrid's head - this is just how a 12 year old would think, and I could feel Magnus agony as he replayed over and over the events that led to tragedy.)

There's a very pleasing symmetry to the architecture of the book. And Smith takes some dazzling risks with the language (Michael's atrocious poetry. The breathless invocations of old films.)

What else could you want, hey?

Some humour? Yes, plenty of that too.

Smith is up against the other Smith (Zadie, of course) for this year's Orange Prize, both 5/2 favourites at the moment.

Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is also listed, and there are some very interesting parallels I feel with Ali Smith's novel. (What's real vs. what's imagined? The mirror held up against 21st Britain.)

Domestic Women and Short Story Land

The New Writing Anthology 13 is edited by Toby Litt and Ali Smith: their forward appeared in yesterday's Guardian.

This reference to the state of the short story had me scratching my head. What do you reckon?

The most popular form by far was the short story. This is probably explained by there being, at the moment, so few outlets for shorter prose fiction. In the end though, as we read through the large stack of manuscripts, we began to believe that somewhere out there is a strange, pseudo-English country called Short-Story-Land where all day long, peculiarly short-story-like things happen. We began to dread starting a story only to find we were once again in Short-Story-Land.

But it was their comments on women's writing which stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy:

On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.

Domestic? Dulled? Melancholy?

Not on your life, say A.L. Kennedy Yvonne Roberts and Jane Rodgers in today's pages.

All nicely argued stuff and food for thought. (And if your want even more controversy, click here.)