OF A GOLDEN AGE

Ian McEwan describes a daydream through the eyes of antihero Briony:

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back. [...]

She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn’t there somewhere else for people to go?

I had a great analogy in mind to open my review of Ian McEwan’s demi-epic Atonement, but it was late last night right before bed and I’ve forgotten. I’m sure it was about a time someone misunderstood or made a halting error, because that’s the primary thread running through the book: How the appearance of an event or an action can sometimes, especially when taken out of context, contradict its true significance. A stolen moment glanced from the wrong angle can look violent instead of loving, just as the wrong few seconds of an impassioned description of your day can lead a passerby to believe you’re unhappy with your life.

This review is going to contain some spoilers, both of the book and the movie, which it turns out are thankfully similar.

McEwan opens with the mind of Briony Tallis, an annoying, self-involved girl whose powerful mind submerses her into her imagined life as a writer. It’s clear that she has thoughts she believes are deep, and as she moves through her life and has thought processes about her family and those around her, it’s also clear she has deep misunderstandings about how the world works. How could she not? Her two siblings are grown and her parents are mentally or physically absent. Briony decides to be important:

This was the challenge shew as putting to existence — she would not stir, not for dinner, not even for her mother calling her in. She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

Briony looks at everyone in her life critically as she misinterprets events, and she creates terrible consequences for her sister Cecilia and their family friend Robbie. At some point, Briony reflects to herself that she may now be hated by an adult instead of by other children. She remarks that a child’s hatred is constant, ever-changing, and meaningless, and she has in fact acted on her own caprices and ruined someone’s life.

McEwan reflects on changing feelings, of how we each carry all of our previous selves with us and must explain them to people. Cecilia and Robbie hesitate to be in love because each remembers the other from childhood, each knows the other’s circumstances for better or worse. Adult Briony must reconcile the devastation she created as an adolescent, when she had just enough skills to know how to make herself a believable witness and spin a convincing story, to connive in order to harm another person even if she felt it was the morally just action.

I loved this book, even though I had the major plot points in mind from having seen the movie. McEwan is a beautiful writer with a particular knack, in this book at least, for capturing how contradictory it feels to be inside a young adult’s brain: To feel something and know it is unreasonable and feel it all the more; to see what happens and convince yourself it is all about you no matter what, because self-consciousness can become a sickness under the wrong circumstances.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

I’ll take “Things that hit close to home” for $500:

A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students.

Rebecca Miller’s novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, conspiratorily rushed into a feature film a year after its publication, does my favorite thing: It creates and loves on a strong, intelligent woman protagonist. It also delves into the mind of her twentysomething daughter who is equally strong and intelligent with reactionary traits from her experiences as Pippa’s daughter.

Pippa is middle aged, married to a thirty-years-older man who has moved them into a “retirement village” where Pippa instantly becomes the youngest person she knows and feels surprisingly burdened by her newfound freedom and limited possessions. She looks at her husband and sees his newfound frailty and is reminded of the difference in their ages, I guess, although it is never illustrated why she feels this way or what her feelings really are.

He alludes to the way he rescued her from her earlier life, and in a framed middle section of the book we see the life he means — in which Pippa’s mother is a diet-pill addict with complex neediness issues and Pippa breaks free in an extreme way that almost alienates her as a relatable character. Paradoxically it gives her power, both personally and narratively, as she swirls through her life and lets a lot of things happen to her. Her one life-changing action excuses several years’ worth of passive nonresistance, and eventually, Pippa’s choice of a settled family life is a stark exercise of control over her own life.

I liked this book mostly because of Miller’s beautiful writing, which is thick with descriptive language but not choked by it. Her tone and choices completely suit Pippa’s mindframe as she experiences bored first-world problems in her new life as an unemployed housewife with children who’ve moved out. Nothing about Pippa’s life is familiar to me — especially not her reckless, horrifying life as a pre-matrimony twentysomething — but I still loved her and related to her dilemmas.

This book is kind of like the magazine Real Simple, which I also love, even though it has nothing to do with my life, even though the idea of curbing your busyness by buying hired help or expensive organizational furniture is alien to me. Because who isn’t pulled a little by the idea of a simple, elegant life full of single fresh flowers in spotless vases, of “easy” meals of shrimp or lamb chops alongside fresh asparagus? There is not glamor in a plate of spaghetti, unless, like Pippa, you put caught-daily Long Island clams on it.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.