Madeleine St John - The Women in Black

Not to be confused with the West-End-play-turned-Daniel-Radcliffe-film The WomAn in Black, this is a charming little book about women working in a department store in Sydney during the late 1950s. Madeleine St John was a graduate of the University of Sydney with contemporaries such as Clive James and Bruce Beresford, and she wrote four books late in life, one of which was short-listed for the Booker. The Women in Black is a delightful story which deftly and lightly depicts the lives of women in Sydney at a particular time.

F. G. Goodes is an elegant department store, much like I imagine David Jones was in its day, an icon in the Sydney CBD, where the best of the best is sold. The women who work there wear a smart black uniform and come to know much about one another. St John depicts their lives with sardonic humour, yet she clearly empathises with the characters and sympathises with their subjection to the times and traditions in which they live.

The story focuses on four women who staff the ladies' cocktail dress department. Patty is a childless woman whose dull life becomes unsettled when she is enchanted by a glamorous black nightie in the lingerie section one lunchtime. She buys it and takes it home, and when her blue collar husband discovers her in the act of trying it on, an unexpected and unprecedented night of passion ensues, after which her discombobulated husband disappears for a time. Patty is left properly jolted for the first time, and wondering what her future might hold, realising the status quo is no longer. Faye is a single girl on the verge of being a matron. She realises her behaviour is in danger of giving her a reputation as a 'good-times girl' and has given up on parties, certain she will never find a husband, until she is one day introduced to one of those strange, 'continental' types, who changes everything for her. Magda is the wise European glamour-puss who runs the exclusive 'Model Gowns' section of the cocktail dress department. St John uses her to illustrate the attitude in 1950s Australia towards all things foreign - Magda is regarded with suspicion and yet admired as the most sophisticated of the staff, just as the model gowns themselves are different yet sought-after. Magda's dress-sense and character alienate her from the other staff, but she appears to prefer it this way and, when a young work experience girl is hired to work in cocktail dress, Magda takes her under her wing with expansive warmth, playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. Lesley, the work experience girl, a young slip of a thing, takes the opportunity to change her name to 'Lisa' as she has always wanted to, and blossoms under Magda's knowledgeable supervision. She represents a new generation, having completed her leaving certificate and hoping to attend 'The University', in spite of her father's derision. Lisa welcomes the refined input Magda gives to her life and passes it on, introducing her mother to new delights - such as salami. Through her we see that Sydney, too, will ultimately benefit from increased foreign influence.

St John paints a marvellous, light-hearted picture of a society that is changing rapidly. This is not an earth-shattering book but it is hugely enjoyable and will resonate particularly for women who experienced 1950s Australia themselves, or whose mothers can recall this period.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5

Pros: St John's writing is quite novel, for its time - there is a passage where she described a New Year's Eve party, and she does so entirely in little snippets of dialogue. Brilliant, and thoroughly unexpected, particularly as a highly anticipated romantic encounter takes place during the night and is thus glossed over.

Cons: Not sure this will continue to carry such resonance as time moves on. However, I do hope this little treasure of a book is retained as a portrait of the time.

Tom Rachman - The Imperfectionists

I loved this book. I bought it in Portland, at Powell's Bookstore, which is now amongst my favourite bookstores in the world, where this was displayed prominently in the fiction section and classified as an 'Old Favourite'. It was published in 2011, so really it's not so old; but I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Presumably if I lived in the United States I would have. It was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times Bestseller.

Rachman is a journalist who has been both a foreign correspondent and an editor of The International Herald Tribune. This book is loosely based on the heritage of that paper. It is set largely in Rome, and describes the lives of ex-pat journos working on the paper whilst leading ordinary human existences in Europe.

For me, the astonishing success of this book is the fact that Rachman pulls off a novel about the newspaper industry which tells simultaneously the story of the historical rise and fall of a particular paper, and the story of the journalists and staffers employed by that paper at a given point in time (the present, as it were). Each chapter title consists of a headline, and each chapter focuses in on the life of one of the staffers. But at the end of each chapter is another mini-chapter which follows the historical life of the paper from the 1950s to its demise in the present day, as it changes hands, as its publishers grow old and hand the paper over to the next generation, as the print media environment undergoes major shifts and changes. By the end, we have in effect read two books in one. As Christopher Buckley of the New York Times Book Review says, "I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off." For such a young man, Rachman is extraordinarily accomplished.

My grandfather worked in print media (magazines), and newspapers and magazines (as well as books) were ever-present in my European childhood home. The newspaper we read as a family was The International Herald Tribune. So I suppose I was always going to be a sucker for this book, also because the best job I have ever had was working in newspapers. I am a lawyer, not a journalist, but working as an editorial lawyer alongside editors and writers seemed to fulfil several of my career ambitions at once and I absolutely loved it. I loved the buzz of the newsroom floor and the frantic rush as the print deadline approached each day, and I loved the fact that history hung tangibly in the air. It was easily possible, looking around the newsroom, to envisage the olden days of typewriters and the haze of cigarette smoke. After being taken on a tour of the offsite printing presses (a memory I will always treasure), it was possible, also, to imagine what it used to be like in the building I worked in, when the printing presses sat in the basement (which now houses a library), and staff throughout the building could hear and feel them running, and when it was in fact possible to run downstairs and yell "Stop the presses!" and have that mean something.

Losing that job to the same fate that Rachman describes in his book (financial struggles of the paper at the hands of a rapidly changing media environment, and a re-structure that had editorial legals outsourced to an external law firm) was heart-breaking, and I found reaching the end of this book similarly emotional.

Rachman is a brilliant writer. I became deeply absorbed in every chapter of the book. He writes extraordinarily well in a cacophony of voices - young girl, older woman, old men, younger men. All perspectives were convincing. Not an easy feat for any writer. I started caring about each character almost as soon as a new chapter started. Leo Ott, the wealthy entrepeneur who started the paper as a labour of love for a woman who would never know, even after his death, just how much she was adored. Arthur Gopal, the obituary writer whose job is unimportant to him whilst he is in the company of his young daughter Pickle, who reminds him of the more visceral joys in life, but whose life changes irrevocably in the most heart-wrenching way. Winston Cheung, the rookie journo trying to make a go of it reporting from Cairo, only to be bulldozed by veteran hack Snyder. Ornella de Montericchi, a woman whose lonely life gains meaning from her methodical reading of every word in every edition of the paper, and whose world collapses when the paper does, too. And finally Oliver Ott, the grandson of the paper's founder, whose only friend is a dog by the name of Schopenhauer.

It was interesting to read this novel so soon after reading Egan's a visit from the goon squad, which I enjoyed immensely but failed to wholeheartedly connect with on account of the unusual and disjointed way the story was told. Rachman too uses a method that might have readers proclaiming the book to be a series of short stories rather than a novel, but because the protagonists of all of his stories occupy the same space (the newspaper) and the same narrative present, they are united in a way that Egan's characters were not. And in any case, the protagonist of this novel is actually the newspaper itself, a device that works wonderfully well.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I loved it. Of course, it may have resonated with me more than with most people, so perhaps take that into account if you are considering picking it up.

Cons: The last chapter ends with an event that is brutal and shocking and unexpected. I think the brutality here is intended by Rachman to provide a mirror image of some sort between life itself and the life of the paper - so that the impact of the death of the paper - on the characters who populate it, but also as a deeply significant cultural development - is felt keenly even by readers without a newspaper background or a particular interest in print media. It works, but it is deeply unsettling and I think some readers might be put off by it.

Note: The edition I read has an interview at the end between Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell, a hero of mine. What a fabulous bonus! This is a terrific interview and such a worthwhile read. So many great observations were made by these erudite men in conversation, on the topic of writing, in particular.

For example: "Writing (and reading) is a sort of exercise in empathy, I think. In life, when you encounter people, you and they have separate trajectories, each person pushing in a different direction. What's remarkable about fiction is that it places you in the uncommon position of having no trajectory. You stand aside, motives abandoned for the duration. The characters have the trajectories now, while you just observe. And this stirs compassion that, in real life, is so often obscured by our own motives." Beautiful! And the two men then proceed to discuss whether or not this sympathy for fictional characters translates into greater sympathy for people in life. A great defence of fiction. 

Jennifer Egan - a visit from the goon squad

I put off reading this book for almost a year, due to a series of misconceptions I had formed about it. First, the cover of the paperback I ordered from Amazon is, in my opinion, poorly chosen - the graphic looks like a montage of photos taken at a performance of a children's entertainment group, which is neither appealing nor indicative of content (yes, yes, I know, never judge a book by its cover - but we all do, a little bit, don't we?). Second, the title - goon squad? It sounds like a book about old-time gangsters arriving at someone's door to rough them up a little - not my 'thang', as it were. Of course, having read the book I now get the title and appreciate it. Finally, I had formed an impression, somewhere along the way, that Egan's tour de force belonged alongside popular modern-day books such as Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story - books that are thematically linked by their dystopian outlook on life in the near future. I do like the occasional dystopian novel - l Iove Margaret Atwood's futuristic take, for example, in many of her books, from The Handmaid's Tale to Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. But I get a bit tired of dire futuristic outlooks when they are paired with a cynical and ostensibly humorous narrator's voice that is really a weak pastiche of John Kennedy Toole's dark wit. Often the result is a dismal portrayal of a future just ten or twenty years hence in which nobody cares any longer about things we now care deeply about - in which it is in fact fundamentally uncool to care deeply about anything (hipsterdom on steroids?), but which we are for some reason supposed to find amusing. I had understood that Egan was a Shteyngart-esque writer, and this assumption, combined with the reference to goons, put me off in spite of the fact that a number of people had recommended her to me, and in spite of the knowledge that this book has won so many prestigious book awards (notably the 2011 Pulitzer and the (US) National Book Critics Circle Award ).

In fact, there are no goons in this book, not in the original sense of the word anyway. Instead time itself is referred to by one of the characters as a goon - coming as it does to roughen us up, to steal away our youth. And only one chapter - the last - takes place in the future.

After reading just a few pages of this book, I turned to Bibliohubby and told him I might have found a new female writer I adored, who - if the book continued as it started - I might end up listing in my top ten. This is significant because I realised recently, after reading a number of blogs on the topic and having a think, that I have a slight tendency to prefer male writers to female - not because of gender, of course, or not consciously anyway. The apparent preference is disconcerting. It worries me.

But more on that some other day.

The rest of the book did not unfold quite as I had expected. Indeed, to call this a 'novel' is to reinvent the term, something which critics and readers alike appear to have done with surprising ease, welcoming Egan's story-based form as an innovative and inventive post-postmodern way of telling a bigger story. Egan herself, though admitting that the format of the book makes it hard to classify, has said that she leans towards considering it a novel. Were one to categorise the book along more traditional lines, however, one would have to conclude that it is a book of independent short stories featuring characters who are all loosely interconnected. We meet some of the characters repeatedly throughout the book, sometimes through stories focused on their lives, sometimes through stories in which they play only a peripheral part. The stories hop around in time, from the 1960s to the near future, creating a vivid portrayal of the characters' lives as they unfold over a lifetime. We see them both young and energetic and old and rough - once the goon of time has ravaged them. The result is a vaguely cohesive tale centring largely on Bennie Salazar, a music producer, and his assistant Sasha. The cast of characters making up the meat of the book are all linked to Bennie and/or Sacha at some point in their lives, and most have something to do with the music industry and its profound changes over time.

In addition to the unusual structure of the novel - if one wants to call it that - Egan plays with form and structure within the stories themselves. The story / chapter that has received the most publicity is the one which is told entirely in the form of a Powerpoint presentation - something that the young narrator-protagonist of that story calls a 'slide journal', and which is indicative of the future Egan sees unfolding - one in which technology has taken over to such an extent that Powerpoint is writing, and where words like 'friend' and 'identity' have ceased to have any real world meaning outside of technology. I knew this chapter was coming and I was as curious about it as I was resistant to it. But in fact, in the context, it works beautifully. It's surprising how much can be told about character and meaning and story in just a few words on a Powerpoint slide.

In many of the other stories, Egan will pause in her narration to suddenly take us forward 40 odd years in a character's life and tell us where they ended up, or what happened to them - all within the space of a paragraph. Similarly we are sometimes thrown backwards to learn of a character's early, formative years. In this way time is constantly interrupted and warped, disturbing the usual linear coherence we expect from storytelling. One reviewer has pointed out that the originality here - because of course many authors use flashbacks and flash-forwards - stems from the absence of a narrative present. We can't pinpoint what the 'present' is, here, so even the use of terms such as 'flashback' and 'flash-forward' seems inappropriate.

One is left, after finishing the book, with a strong attachment to some of the characters, and with a sense of sadness about the inevitable changes brought about by the ravages of time. It is a book that will stay with me, I think.

My personal preference is usually for a novel that has some continuity of story. I rarely finish books of short stories, although I know the form is difficult to master and can be even more powerful than longer form writing.  As much as I admire Egan for her obvious electrifying ability to write in a variety of ways about such a cacophony of characters, I think I would have enjoyed this more if it had been written as a more traditional novel. Call me a stick-in-the-mud. One of the complications of the structure Egan has chosen is that one never knows which character will feature in the next story, or which character we will have the pleasure of revisiting later in the book. Some of the stories focused on characters I would otherwise have thought of as 'minor', and I was disappointed, then, at the end, to find that other characters who I would have considered to be significant in the overall plot never re-occurred. For example (spoiler alert!), whatever happened to Alice, the girl Bennie so loved who Scotty ended up marrying? And they were never tipped to be major characters, but the point of time was so powerful that I really wanted to know whether those two delinquent musicians to whom Scotty handed Bennie's card on the pier ever followed up and called Bennie, whether the dude ended up being the great musician his girlfriend claimed he was, whether they made it big. And I was sad to hear Bennie, late in life, talk about Sasha as having 'sticky fingers', something for which he ended up having to fire her. I never anticipated that ending to their friendship, which at times seemed like so much more than mere friendship, and it was strange having that unlikely fact handed to me as an aside in an unrelated conversation that took place years after the event.

However, I do understand that Egan's challenge was to write about time and its effect on people and their lives. This was very successfully achieved through the structure she chose, and would have been difficult to pull off had goon squad been written in customary novel-form.

Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. As much as I enjoyed a visit from the goon squad, I am left with a keen desire to know whether that strong voice I loved at the beginning of the book is able to be sustained through a proper novel - goon squad didn't provide me with the answer. I want to read Egan's earlier books, three of which are actual novels, to find out whether my suspicion that she belongs in my basket of favourites is justified.

Pros: Wonderful writing, intriguing characters, thoughtful themes.

Cons: As discussed above, I simply prefer a novel to a collection of short stories, and the fact that this was written in such an unusual way meant that I felt I missed out on some material that might otherwise have been included. Also, to be truly cynical, there is a touch of self-conscious try-hardedness (not a word!) here - it's a good way to win a prize, isn't it? To sit down and show you can write successfully in many different voices, to show off one's skills  by convincingly writing from both male and female perspectives, as a youth as well as a senior, in traditional formats as well as in the form of a Powerpoint presentation. I don't like feeling played, and there is a little bit of that going on here, even though Egan pulls this all off effortlessly.