Guidelines for the Summer Book Club: if you’ve read this book, what did you think? If not, what are you reading this week? Please comment, or post on your own blog and link in the comments below.
Don’t get me wrong: Anna Quindlen’s Still Life With Bread Crumbs is a good book. The prose is beautifully invisible, just as I like it. The characters are, with one exception, convincing, and the structure is odd enough to keep things interesting.
In terms of plot, though, my alarms started going off early. Still Life With Bread Crumbs is a middle-aged-lady romantic fantasy, and my antipathy to such fantasies may be a symptom of my own self-loathing. I am, after all, a middle-aged lady. I am in good health and of relatively sound mind, and some people find me pleasant and/or interesting company. However, I feel quite certain that, if my husband runs off with … whoever, men twenty years my junior will not be mooning around about my extraordinary mouth, or whatever my equivalent is to Rebecca Winter’s odd sixty-year-old embouchre.
Maybe I’m wrong about this – what do I know about men and what they moon about? – and, if so, I apologize to Anna Quindlen, and men, and middle-aged ladies everywhere, for my incredulity. However, the character of Jim Bates is a classic romance novel hero, and I’m not a fan of the genre. Of course we middle-aged ladies would like to believe that men like he exist, men who can fix the roof AND survey local wildlife in their spare time AND bring us packets of their fresh-killed venison because they sense we might need it AND still find time to be a bit distracted because there is something about us that they just can’t shake free of. I have less life experience than Anna Quindlen or her heroine; also, if Quindlen’s bio photo is any indication, I am considerably less attractive at forty-four than she is in her sixties. So maybe she knows things I don’t.
Nonetheless, the passages from Jim Bates’ point of view prompted me to say, “Oh, come on,” more than once. Out loud. Lines like “every time Jim Bates looked at her lower lip he had an impulse to take it gingerly between his front teeth” would be interesting if they were complicated by some sort of ambivalence or even menace, but instead, they seem to be expressions of a tender manly (read: Harlequinesque) desire for a woman old enough to be his mother that I just can’t swallow. Do I think men in their forties can be sexually attracted to women in their sixties? Of course they can. Do I think that attraction manifests itself the way Quindlen portrays it? I don’t, and she didn’t convince me.
That said, I held my nose and kept reading, because there’s so much else going on here. Rebecca isn’t a straightforward Mary Sue; she’s difficult, bruised, and mostly realistic in her assessments of herself, particularly her fall from art stardom to poverty and mediocrity, and the demise of her pretty nasty marriage. Her portrait of her relationship with her ex-husband is delicious, full of observations like
Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he had betrayed her but because he had betrayed his son. This was one of those statements that sounded sensible until you compared it against actual human psychology.
or – and this one just kills me:
Peter would do something…and she would gather up her shreds of dignity and respond with the silent treatment. Except that Peter liked the silent treatment – he found it restful.
I mean, that is one beautiful line. There are more. I kept considering tossing this book aside, and then something like that would come up, and I’d think, Wow, and I’d keep reading. I’m not sorry. I’m not able to suspend my disbelief enough to truly enjoy traditional romances, but Quindlen’s exemplar is an impressive one.
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Also read this week: Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep, while I wait for The Fever to be available at my library. I took a stab at Abbott’s Dare Me a few years ago, and felt like if I could get past the demanding prose at the beginning, I would probably find it riveting. (I’ve said it before: i like my prose invisible. Anything showy puts me off.) Being short on time, I didn’t push on. Bury Me Deep gave me the same trouble, but it’s summer now, and I made the effort, and was rewarded. It’s a wonderfully rich little pot-boiler, and I can’t wait to get Abbott’s other novels.
Abandoned this week:
- The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. I wanted to be charmed by this book. It’s clear that Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, one of my favourite books, is an important influence. However, about 1/4 of the way in, I began to suspect that The Rosie Project is about how someone with Asperger’s syndrome can learn to be a delightful romantic hero by just trying harder, and my gut reaction was “No thanks.”
- Delicious! by Ruth Reichl. I probably didn’t give Delicious! a fair shot. I love Reichl’s memoir Tender at the Bone; I teach it in my memoir class, and a lot of my students like it too. It became apparent after a few pages that Delicious! is nothing like Tender at the Bone, and the exposition contains a lot of clunky dialogue, so I moved on.
- The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton. See above re: showy prose. Don’t like it. This is my third stab at The Rehearsal; I keep being seduced by the cover and the promise of a story about high school sex scandals and precocious artistic teenagers. People keep telling me I should read The Luminaries instead, but seriously, look at the size of it.
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Have you read Still Life With Bread Crumbs, or any of the other books I read/attempted this week? If so, what did you think? If not, what are you reading?
Classroom as Microcosm 
What do you think?