Lonely girls

Title: A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing
Author: Jessie Tu
Published: July 2020, Allen and Unwin

I’m not in the most chipper of moods these days, so have been trying to stay away from dark reading material. However, given how I took to this novel, I guess I did harbour a latent desire to read about a fucked up person.

Jena Lin is on the surface your typical Asian over-achiever – a violin prodigy. However, she is the picture of the genius unravelling, using sex to fill her personal void. I’m actually kind of tired of that particular trope – but the music and the close look at what it takes to produce it held my attention, despite the graphic descriptions of violent sex.

There is a queer undertone to the novel, and in the end, it turns out, as it often does in feminist stories, is that what Jena needs is a mother’s love, a friend’s love.

A Suitable Boy (BBC series)

·  I read the book over a decade ago, and it is astonishing how little I remembered of the plot. Obviously, they were searching for “a boy”, and I remember the protagonist’s name was Lata, and there was something akin to the Babri Masjid conflict and an LK Advani figure in it. That is all

·  The Lata character in the series was beauteous and exactly as I would have imagined well (well a little more beautiful than I imagined her to be)

·  It is odd to watch Indian people predominantly speaking English on screen, even though I am exactly one of those people

·  The setting and costume of the series is stunning

·  Because I didn’t remember much from the book, I was kind of meh about the ending. I get it, but I was still rooting for Kabir. In this regard, I am appreciating how much further Battle for Bittora goes.

·  I liked the homoeroticism between Maan and Firoz

·  Tabu is my new girl crush.

·  What I disliked the most is how conservative it is in the end, apart from the obvious. The upper classes all close ranks – Waris, the nawab’s man Friday, is made out to be a bad guy for standing for election in a constituency he’s been nurturing for years, a stabbing is forgiven, the lowly tutor dies. All’s well that ends well for the wealthy, who marry within their own castes. Okay.

Have you watched the series? What did you think?

A tribute to walking while reading

Title: Milkman
Author: Anna Burns
Published: September 2018, Faber and Faber

In one of the sections of my thesis on chick lit in India, I explored how the protagonists navigate space – both their private domestic space and the space of the city. In fact, Indian chick lit novels are more concerned with the latter – the cityscape of cafes, shopping malls, nightclubs and the like . There is not much description of the private living space of these women; their identity is played out against the backdrop of the wider city.

In Why Loiter, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have pointed out that young women even in the seemingly most liberated of urban locales are not free of the anxiety about their safety. Many upper-middle-class women solve this problem by leading their lives in “public-private” spaces, such as the cafes and nightclubs above, a pre-condition of which is access to economic and cultural capital. Rather than navigate the streets on foot or even take public transport, they cocoon themselves in cars. To step entirely out into the public arena is implicitly fraught with danger.

The threat lurking at every corner, although not explicitly stated in Indian chick lit but only implicit in the manner in which the Indian chick lit protagonist carries herself through space, connects her to the protagonist of Anna Burn’s Milkman. 

Although the 18-year-old protagonist of the novel is situated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, her immediate concerns are similar to those of young women everywhere, although the dangers of her predicament are compounded by the civil war.

Quite simply, she cannot walk the streets without harassment. A man, the titular “milkman” (who, to add to the confusion, is not a real milkman, that being another – more commendable character – in the novel), decides he wants her and proceeds to stalk her into agreeing to be with him. He is a man of some political clout and therefore difficult to refuse, although she does.

The protagonist is not only a woman who likes to walk alone, she likes to walk while reading 19th C novels (because the 20th century doesn’t appeal to her). This is what marks her out for disapproval in her neighbourhood, not (as she assumes) that she is allegedly having a liaison with a powerful married man. What kind of person, she is asked, walks about while not paying attention to her surroundings in Belfast at such a time?

As someone who routinely reads and walks at the same time (even when I was pregnant, to the dismay of my colleagues, who felt the need to supervise me), Milkman‘s unnamed protagonist was a woman after my own heart.

Now, not only does she walk, but she runs. Running was an activity she enjoyed, but one that did not save her from the milkman, who proceeded to run with her. She was obliged to recruit her excercise-mad third brother-in-law to run with her. Although this man is known and loved in the neighbourhood for putting women on a pedestal, even he cannot be counted on to support the protagonist in her own personal troubles, although he does run with her.

She tries to tell her mother and is disbelieved. She tries to tell her oldest friend and is berated for calling attention to herself with her reading.

She finds she has in fact become, to her neighbours, as weird as the “ten-minute area”, “some bleak, eerie, Mary Celeste little place” so called because “it took ten minutes to walk through it. This would be hurrying, no dawdling, though no one in their right mind would think of dawdling there”.

Except that she does, in one of the episodes that makes this book such absurd comedy:

The fact I myself was in it, talking to a sinister man while holding the head of a cat that had been bombed to death by Nazis was proof, if anything, that the ten-minute area was not for normal things.

and

He was also saying nothing, as if it were inconsequential to be standing where nobody ever stood at a quarter to ten of a summer’s night beside a teenage girl holding a decapitated head, while chatting to her about taking the life of the boyfriend she was maybe-involved with.

Worn down by the pursuit of the milkman and the insistence of her community on blaming her for this, she retreats into herself, the only place that is untouched by the prying world that refuses to understand. Not giving in to questions was “my one bit of power in this disempowering world”, she says, but later realises:

What an idjit me, I thought, and I meant in thinking is protected myself, believing myself safe from the wrong/spouse category by staying in the maybe-category when it turns out a person can be done to death in the maybe-category as well.

She finds herself in the “beyond the pale” category, alongside the feminist group of women: “these women constituting the nascent feminist group in our area – and exactly because of constituting it – were firmly placed in the category of those way, way beyond-the-pale. The word ‘feminist’ was beyond-the-pale. The word ‘woman’ barely escaped beyond-the-pale’.” So beyond the pale are they that when they requesed the chapel to let them use one of the hutments on the wasteground which it allowed the “renouncers” to use for their meetings, they were turned down on the grounds that “they could be plotting subversive acts in it. They could be having homosexual intercourse in it. They could be performing and undergoing abortions in it.”

Burns’ writing has been described as dense but her matter-of-fact descriptions of life under civil war and how the political enlarges on the personal had me smiling through much of the novel.

This is anything but a bleak read and, if you’re still dithering over whether you can stomach it, rest assured that all’s well that ends well.

 

 

Sleeplit?

 

Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Published: July 2018, Penguin

This novel provides another variation on the standard chick lit formula that Green Girl  pointed to.

The unnamed protagonist (who I inexplicably thought was named Anthea) has all the markers of neoliberal success – she is tall, thin, blonde and pretty, with enough money to be fashionable, to gain a degree in art history and to land a job in an hip art gallery owing to the above pedigree.

She decides, instead, to go off the grid and hibernate for a year. To achieve this, she drugs herself, having found a batshit crazy compliant psychiatrist.

Anthea’s (I’m just going to all her that) goal is to sleep. In this, she is a my hero. Sleeping has long been one of my favourite passtimes pursuits – I fear it’s a family affliction, or at least one that the female members of my immediate family are susceptible to. Both my husband and my brother-in-law are confused/perturbed/annoyed by how much my sister and I want/need to sleep. My father is just resigned vis a vis my mother.

My reluctance to wake up/desire to just lie there has been dubbed “lazy” by my daughter (who, influenced by my husband’s “rise and shine” world view, has conveniently forgotten how she likes/needs to laze in bed in the morning herself, even if she has dropped her nap). My sister-in-law sees being awake as much as possible the ideal and sees sleeping as a waste of time I guess I don’t have the same enthusiasm for time and the things one might do with it in one’s waking hours.

Increasingly, I think had I been presented with Neo’s choice in The Matrix, I would have chosen the blue pill.

All this to say that Anthea’s plan holds a certain appeal for me. Heck, I believe a large part of my adult life has been an attempt at such a plan, minus the drugs. I actually hate swallowing pills.

In stepping off the neoliberal grid, if only to recharge and reorient herself, Anthea becomes the alter-ego of the typical chick lit protagonist. But Anthea’s pursuit is not simply experimental. It becomes increasingly clear that she is depressed.

In this, there are some similarities with Green Girl, a novel that seems to have traumatised me (too close to the bone, perhaps) to the extent that I see that template everywhere – listless privileged girl drifting through life, do we care?

What could be worse than a woman who goes from bed to job to the pub all in a fog of disinclination? A woman who spends the entire course of the novel drugged and asleep.

And yet in her waking hours, Anthea has interesting observations to make. We are given glimpses into the life that led up to her hibernation. We learn of her parents, from whom she seemed quite detached and yet whom it becomes increasingly clear she is grieving. Apart from this, these disconnected parents are also the material condition of her existence in New York, from her art history degree to her apartment in New York.

Also, Moshfegh manages to move the story along by having things somehow happen. In fact, at one point, I was quite sure that the novel was going to take a turn for the noir (thankfully, it didn’t).

In both this novel and Green Girl, the protagonist has a rather loud, somewhat unlikable friend. In fact, Moshfegh’s Reva reminded me so much of Zambreno’s Agnes that I became convinced that My Year of Rest and Relaxation was a parody of Green Green or an experiment in taking its premise to the extreme.

Both Agnes and Reva function as counterpoints to the protagonist, another iteration of the could-be can-do girl, but Reva more clearly poses the question – is it better to be a functional alcoholic/bulimic or just let it all go a la Anthea?

Both Agnes and Reva provide a point of interest in a story that threatens to turn terribly dull. In Green Girl, Ruth accompanies Agnes to an abortion clinic, where she (Ruth) expresses some of the more interesting observations of the entire novel.

In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Anthea rouses herself sufficiently to attend Reva’s mother’s funeral, a development that is not only miraculous in the context of the narrative but also a credit to Moshfegh’s pacing, as it was around this point that I was starting to get tetchy. Reva’s genuine grief is in sharp contrast to Anthea’s own apparent detachment, thereby highlighting the difference between the two women. Reva still remains tethered not just to the material gloss of New York but to the world of people and relationships (if that wasn’t sufficiently clear by her dogged pursuit of Anthea). This humanising of the brash bestie never quite happens in Green Girl.

Another similarity between both novels, and one they share with chick lit in general, is the presence of a Mr Big figure. In Green Girl, Ruth now and then alludes to Him who she longs to be dominated by, someone in her past that she both escaped and desires, blah blah. Honestly, those parts rather bored me (more than the rest, described as they were in such extreme cliched terms).

Meanwhile, Anthea has Trevor, who also treats her badly. Her description of the Trevor type though was one of my favourite bits of the novel:

He was clean and fit and confident. I’d choose him a million times over the hipster nerds I’d see around town and at the gallery. In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An ‘alternative’ to the mainstream frat boys and permed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly charmless intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments.

Now that I think about it, there’s a further between the two novels: mothers. Ruth’s mother is dead/departed (I thought she had abandoned her, many people seem to have read her as the narrator of the novel). So is Anthea’s, but the problems there are more exposed. With Ruth, I felt like I was at one of those frustrating conversations where the other person keeps alluding to something but not quite letting on what the hell is going on (“spit it out,” I want to shout).

And then, both Ruth and Anthea have a passion for film. But while Ruth’s are high brow, Anthea’s tastes tend to the mainstream – her favourite is Whoopi Goldberg.

Finally, My Year of R&R works (for me anyway) because of its dry humour. This is best showcased in the darkly comic figure of Dr Tuttle, the psychiatrist, who seems to be unravelling as much as her patient client. She continually forgets about Anthea’s background, and on being reminded that Anthea’s mother committed suicide, muses: “People like your mother … give psychotropic medication a bad name.”

Finally, my pet peeve. What is with Western writers alluding to characters speaking in Cantonese but giving them non-Cantonese names (e.g. Ping Xi, in this book). If you’re trying to show your cosmopolitan creds, at least get the differences between various Chinese people right. Harumph.